


At a Snail’s Pace

by HazelBeka



Category: Naruto
Genre: ANBU slice of life, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Slow Burn, collection of prompt fics, idiots to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:36:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 50,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26758855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HazelBeka/pseuds/HazelBeka
Summary: A collection of hurt/comfort fics inspired by the Comfortween prompt list, all featuring Tenzou and Kawaguchi, my OC from Bleed Out and From the Dust. Entirely self-indulgent
Relationships: Tenzou/Kawaguchi Rikuo (OC)
Comments: 311
Kudos: 155





	1. Too hot!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stupidbadgers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stupidbadgers/gifts).



> All the fics I'll be posting here are inspired by prompts for [Comfortween](https://hurtcomfortex.dreamwidth.org/22946.html), which is a hurt/comfort prompt list for October. Chapter titles are the prompts. I don't know if I'll fill them all but I'm inspired by quite a lot of them so we'll see how I go! All the fics are kinda based off the dynamic between the characters in [From the Dust](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5353178/chapters/12362576), where Tenzou is in a team with Kawaguchi and Miho (Pheonix from Bleed Out) but if anyone is here because they shipped Tenzou/Kawaguchi after reading Bleed Out (I know there were a few...though I don't know how likely it is that anyone is going to read these besides myself and Badger lol) then don't worry, you don't have to read Dust. I think this first fic sums up the relationship between Tenzou, Kawaguchi and Miho pretty well. Kakashi will probably show up in a few of these as well. Listen, I just want to write self-indulgent ANBU fic and lots of Tenzou/Kawaguchi banter (and idk maybe some kissing or something). And thanks to Badger, who has enabled me a shocking amount, I'm gonna just go ahead and do it. These are all for you, Badger - enjoy! <3

Tenzou had been assigned to his new ANBU team for only a few weeks when it became clear that putting the wood guy on the fire user’s team was as much of a bad idea as Miho had predicted.

They were on one of the private ANBU training fields, not far from the Forest of Death and hemmed in by the northern wall and the warded fence that cut them off from the general training areas. The idea was that ANBU should be far enough away from the village proper that they could train with all their strength, and it worked very well for that purpose. However it also meant that if something went wrong, there was no one to hear you scream.

In part, it was Tenzou’s own fault for encouraging Miho to stop holding back. It turned out that when you were raised in a village with the humidity of Mist and decided to specialise in fire jutsu, you had to go big or go home. And since Miho was a defector, she was never going home.

The roar of flames was more vicious than he’d expected, charring through Tenzou’s mokuton attack in seconds. Panicked by the wall of blazing heat, Tenzou threw up another wall of wood on sheer instinct, the world’s stupidest, most flammable shield. The fire consumed it greedily and Tenzou had to fling his arms up over his face to protect himself from the blaze. The metal plates of armour attached to his goddamn arms _sizzled_.

And then Kawaguchi grabbed him around the waist and dragged him backwards. Seconds later, the flames were gone and Miho was hurrying towards them.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry!” she wailed. “Did I hurt you? I _told_ you this would happen!”

“I’m OK,” Tenzou said reflexively. He was absolutely not OK, judging by the searing pain on both his forearms. He would probably have continued to insist he was just fine out of sheer embarrassment, but Kawaguchi – who was turning out, quite shockingly, to be the most sensible member of the team when it came to fire safety – already had his hands on the fastenings of Tenzou’s armour, swearing under his breath as he unclipped the arm guards and threw them to the ground.

“This,” Kawaguchi said, pointing at the angry red burns on Tenzou’s arms, “is why I hide behind you every time she turns herself into a flamethrower.” He moved onto Tenzou’s chest plate, apparently determined to remove every piece of metal on Tenzou’s body.

Miho was also crowding into his personal space, and Tenzou would have liked nothing better than for the ground to open and swallow him up, but he restrained himself from casting the earth jutsu that would have achieved this.

“Oh no, it’s blistering!” she groaned. “I’m going to run and fetch a medic. Stay right here!” She turned and shunshinned away, leaving them with the smouldering remains of the mokuton.

“Not to be that guy and say I told you so,” Kawaguchi said, flinging the chest plate down and then crouching so he could get at Tenzou’s leg plates, “but I did scream and run away, which turned out to be exactly the right reaction.”

Tenzou was more concerned at how weird this whole undressing thing was getting. He tried to pull his leg back and Kawaguchi clamped a hand firmly behind his knee.

“My legs are fine! You really don’t have to do that.”

“Tenzou, if you don’t shut up and let me strip you, I’ll start making jokes about how hot you are.”

It was a tough call which of those fates was worse, but in the end Tenzou shut up and let Kawaguchi strip him.

Once the last of the armour had been discarded, Kawaguchi led him away from the smoke to an area where it was easier to breathe. It turned out that one of the many disadvantages of ANBU masks was that they didn’t cope well with heat, and Tenzou pulled his to the side of his head so he could suck in some of the cooler air as he sat down on the grass.

Kawaguchi pulled his mask off as well. There was soot in his pale hair and his face was flushed from the heat. He knelt down and looked critically at Tenzou’s arms, and then brought his hands together to start forming a jutsu.

“Healing a burn is beyond me, but I can at least cool it down a little,” he said.

His hands glowed with a soft blue light and he held a palm over each of Tenzou’s arms, moving slowly up and down the burns without touching the blistering skin. A coolness emanated from his hands, soothing the throbbing heat. Tenzou didn’t know if it would help the burns at all, but it definitely helped with the pain. Slowly, he relaxed a little.

“Where’d you learn that trick?” he asked.

“Kakashi. He’s basically a jutsu encyclopaedia so whenever I need to learn something new, I go and bug him until he teaches me.” Kawaguchi glanced up at him. “And there was no way I was going to join Team Forest Fire without learning _something_ to treat burns.”

“Team…?” Tenzou closed his eyes and pulled a face. “You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?”

“No,” Kawaguchi said cheerfully. “And you just forfeited the right to laugh at me when I run away.”

“I think _you_ just forfeited the right to use me as a human shield.”

“What good would it do if I got barbecued instead? One of us needs to take one for the team, and since you’re smoking hot anyway…”

“You said you weren’t going to make any terrible jokes,” Tenzou accused.

Kawaguchi grinned at him. “I lied.”

As he moved his hands up Tenzou’s arms again, Tenzou noticed that his fingers were red and sore from where he’d touched the plates of Tenzou’s armour.

“Is that jutsu helping you as well?” he asked, feeling bad suddenly that he hadn’t admitted he was hurt and dealt with it himself. There’d been no need for both of them to get burnt.

“A little,” Kawaguchi said. “But it’s really not so bad. I’ve had worse than this trying to cook. Did you know that when something’s been in the oven, it comes out really hot?”

Despite the pain, which was nowhere near as bad as it had been but still an ache beneath the cold, Tenzou snorted.

“How is it that you’re the disaster and I’m the one who got hurt?”

“Because I know I’m a disaster and act accordingly. You –” he tapped Tenzou on the nose with one cold finger, “need to learn from your senpai.”

“Who, Kakashi?”

“Don’t sass me, Tenzou, I have very cold hands and I _will_ abuse my power.” He held a hand threateningly up to Tenzou’s face again and Tenzou leaned back to avoid the chill.

He wasn’t sure if it was Kawaguchi’s jutsu or the distraction of his conversation, but his arms didn’t feel so bad anymore. He’d have no problem holding out until Miho came back with the medic.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll try and be less stupid next time.”

“We’ll figure this teamwork thing out,” Kawaguchi said. “It may take some trial and error but as long as our captain doesn’t burn us to a crisp along the way, I think we’ll do just fine.” He gave Tenzou an easy smile, and somehow Tenzou believed him.

“Just stop calling us Team Forest Fire until then.”

“But it has such a great ring to it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP all my subscribers who are gonna get spammed with this for the rest of October instead of the kakairu content they signed up for.
> 
> Also I commissioned the wonderful [Sel](https://twitter.com/selpuku) to draw Team Phoenix for me so if you would like to see what Kawaguchi and Miho look like, you now can! The art is [here](https://hazelbeka-blog.tumblr.com/image/630812296209465344) on tumblr. It's gorgeous, she did a fantastic job, and now I never have to remember to describe my characters again because I can just shove a visual in your face instead! Amazing <3
> 
> EDIT - The amazing Rei drew some art for this chapter!!!! I'm losing my shit, please take a look at it on her tumblr [here](https://reineydraws.tumblr.com/post/641362720208338944/hello-not-to-have-absolutely-no-chill-whatsoever).


	2. Comfort media

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I didn’t know you were scared of horror films,” Tenzou said, and his delight must have been obvious because Kawaguchi turned on him with wide eyes.
> 
> “Why do you sound so happy about that?”
> 
> “Because I enjoy your pain.”

“Tenzou,” Kawaguchi called from the living room, “I’m already regretting that I invited myself over for film night.”

In the kitchen, Tenzou raised an eyebrow as he shook the pan where he was making popcorn.

“Are you insulting my taste in films?” he called back over the popping.

“Yes. Tenzou, ninety percent of your collection is _horror_.” He said it in the same tone someone might say ‘six-foot tall spider’ or ‘the hokage’s naked butt cheeks’. Suddenly, Tenzou was a lot more enthusiastic about film night.

He tipped the popcorn into a bowl, seasoned it, and then carried it through to the lounge. Kawaguchi was standing in front of the DVD rack and staring at the choices with distaste.

“I didn’t know you were scared of horror films,” Tenzou said, and his delight must have been obvious because Kawaguchi turned on him with wide eyes.

“Why do you sound so happy about that?”

“Because I enjoy your pain.” Tenzou set the bowl down and then joined Kawaguchi at the DVD rack. “I can pick if you don’t want to. What are you most scared of?”

“Rom coms,” Kawaguchi said, picking out the single film with a pink case. “I’m really scared of commitment. Let’s watch this.”

Tenzou took the DVD from him, holding it between thumb and forefinger like it was something unpleasant, and slid it back into place. It had been a gift from Kakashi in a misguided attempt to align their tastes in film. Tenzou would have thrown it out long ago if it hadn’t been a present.

“How about a classic monster movie?” he suggested, and by Kawaguchi’s wince he knew he’d struck gold. “I’ve got this great one about a team of ANBU who get lost in the woods overnight and something starts stalking them. Something really hungry, with a lot of sharp teeth.”

“You know what, Tenzou, it was great seeing you tonight but I just remembered an unspecified but _really_ important thing I have to go do, so…” Kawaguchi started towards the door, and Tenzou grabbed his arm without even looking up from the films and tugged him back.

“Oh no you don’t. Movie night was your idea, remember?”

“What did I ever do to you?” Kawaguchi whined. “Besides making you fill out my paperwork and chewing on your pens. And blaming you in the case of Miho’s mysteriously vanishing doughnut.”

“You mean framing me.”

“She bought it though. Oh, and also that one time last week when we had guard duty and I had that song stuck in my head but only the chorus so I hummed it for three whole hours and I swear you’d planned exactly where you were going to bury my body.”

Tenzou pulled the monster movie out of the rack with more sadistic pleasure than he’d thought himself capable of.

“You know, we might even have time for _two_ horror films.”

“You’re a sadist,” Kawaguchi whispered in shocked tones, but he went over to sit on the couch when Tenzou shooed him towards it.

Tenzou slid the disc into the player and turned out the lights. Kawaguchi made an unhappy noise at the darkness, and when Tenzou sat down at the other end of the couch, he shuffled closer.

“Tenzou, because you’re my friend I will watch this monstrosity with you, but only on one condition.”

“You know I can literally stop you if you try to leave? You’re in no position to be making demands.”

Kawaguchi spluttered. “You sound like a torturer at T&I!”

“They offered me a job once, actually.”

“I’m suddenly rethinking my condition.”

“Oh? What is it?”

“That if I watch this film with you, you let me stay over. Because I am _not_ walking home in the dark and sleeping on my own after this.”

Even in the gloom, lit only by the opening scene of the film – a shot of six ANBU walking among the trees of a dense forest at dusk – Tenzou could see that Kawaguchi’s expression was earnest. He pretended to think about it and Kawaguchi gave him the kicked puppy look he was so good at.

“You didn’t bring any overnight stuff.”

“Don’t pretend you’re not the type of guy who has four spare toothbrushes at all times.”

“And you always kick when we share a bed.”

“I do _not_. Tenzou!” He drew out Tenzou’s name in a whine and Tenzou finally gave in.

“All right, fine. If you must.”

“I really must.”

With that settled, they each turned their attention to the TV.

It became clear very quickly that Kawaguchi had not been exaggerating when he’d said he was bad with horror films. He flinched at even the most predictable jump scare, yelled at the characters every time they made a poor decision, which was often, and clapped a hand over his mouth the first time the monster ripped one of the characters limb from limb. After the first half hour, Tenzou had almost stopped watching the film entirely so he could watch Kawaguchi instead.

“You enjoy this?” Kawaguchi asked in horrified fascination as the monster devoured its second victim. He had both hands over his mouth this time so the words came out muffled, but he didn’t tear his gaze away from the screen.

“Everyone needs a hobby.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were a psychopath before I got invested in this friendship?”

“If I’d known you were so easily scared I’d have invited you over much sooner.”

He only grinned at the scandalised look that earned him.

The remaining four ANBU in the film had come across an implausibly creepy house in the woods and had decided to take shelter inside. One of the women went into a bedroom alone – despite Kawaguchi’s impassioned pleas that she stay with the group – and sat down on the bed. She removed her armour, somehow managing to make it look like a weirdly sexual strip tease, courtesy of the camera angles, and then just as she was relaxing, something grabbed her ankle and dragged her down under the bed.

Kawaguchi immediately pulled his feet up onto the sofa and Tenzou burst out laughing.

“Screw you, Tenzou, I am _not_ getting eaten tonight.”

“You’re actually really cute when you’re scared.”

Kawaguchi finally dragged his gaze away from the screen to shoot Tenzou another kicked puppy look.

“That’s the creepiest thing you’ve ever said to me. But you know what? I’ll take it, because it’s probably also the nicest thing you’ve – oh my God, why is he going down to the basement? Tenzou, tell him not to go down there! He’s going to get eaten!”

The unfortunate ANBU was indeed eaten, in an unnecessarily and frankly implausibly gory manner. For the first time since they’d started watching, Kawaguchi went completely silent. He watched a little of the violence without comment before grabbing a cushion and burying his face in it. His shoulders were very tense, and Tenzou slid closer to him, concerned.

“Hey, you OK?” 

“Is it nearly over?” Kawaguchi asked, voice muffled. Tenzou gently tugged the cushion a couple of inches away from his face without removing it as a shield between him and the screen. Kawaguchi didn’t look at him.

“I think so. There’s maybe twenty minutes left, but we can switch it off if you’re not having fun anymore.” He nudged Kawaguchi’s knee with his own. “You know if any monsters do show up, I’ll fight them off for you.”

Kawaguchi did look at him then, and he even managed a small smile. Tenzou was relieved to see it.

“You promise?”

“I might let them nibble your toes, but I’ll save the rest of you.”

Kawaguchi laughed lightly. He lowered the cushion enough to peek over the top. Nothing particularly gory was happening but it was only a matter of time before the final two ANBU were killed off. There was still a little too much tension in Kawaguchi’s shoulders for Tenzou’s liking. He almost reached for the remote and made the decision for them, but he didn’t want the night to end like that. He’d been too pushy, he should have put on one of the cheesier films, and he wanted to make up for it.

He hesitated, considering, and then wrapped an arm around Kawaguchi’s shoulders. He’d half worried that it would be weird, but Kawaguchi immediately nestled into his side and half hid his face in Tenzou’s neck. Tenzou could feel the flutter of his eyelashes against his skin.

“Is that better?” Tenzou asked quietly.

Kawaguchi nodded, and his hair brushed Tenzou’s cheek. “I’ll watch the rest if you let me stay here.”

There was another jump scare, and Kawaguchi flinched but not as dramatically as any of the previous times. He was worrying the hem of Tenzou’s shirt between his fingers and his bottom lip was caught between his teeth, but although he was still quiet it was a different kind of quiet.

“The next time you make me watch one of these, you have to let me snuggle up from the start,” Kawaguchi said suddenly.

Tenzou hadn’t expected that. “You’d watch another one with me? I thought I’d scared you off from film nights for good.”

“Since you agreed to protect me from monsters, I’m willing to try another one. But only if you let me sit right here.” He poked Tenzou’s shoulder to claim his spot.

Tenzou opened his mouth to point out that it was kind of weird for a couple of guys to cuddle up on the sofa together, but the words didn’t come out. It didn’t feel weird. Or maybe it did, a little, but not in a bad way. Kawaguchi was a warm, comfortable presence, and he really did seem soothed by their closeness. Tenzou liked that – that with a simple touch he could make someone feel safe. 

“All right,” he said. “But be warned that I own a _lot_ of horror films.”

Kawaguchi sighed softy against his neck.

“Let’s watch them all,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So these stories are in no particular order, timeline wise. It's going to jump around a bit, so I imagine this one happens a couple of years after the first, when Tenzou and Kawaguchi are much closer as friends. This relationship is a slow, slow burn.


	3. It's not just a river in Egypt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A mission evokes the parts of Tenzou's childhood he'd most like to forget.

Tenzou had harboured dark suspicions about their latest mission from the moment he’d seen the brief. Several children had vanished from their homes in some of the rural villages to the north, and there had been sightings of a tall, dark-haired man in the area. The description alone had been enough to evoke the memory of the stranger who had one day taken him by the hand when he’d been very young and had led him away into the woods, never to return home again.

The memory was fake, he was almost certain. Something he’d constructed over the years, shaped by nightmares and his desperate attempts to remember what had come before the lab. Even some of the things he thought he remembered from those long days of being referred to as a number rather than a name, even in those he couldn’t fully distinguish reality from dream. Some of the things he thought he’d seen, the things he thought he’d heard…he hoped they hadn’t really happened. It would be better, he thought sometimes in the sleepless hours of the night, to forget everything, as though forgetting would have the power to erase it all.

He hadn’t mentioned his suspicions to his teammates as they’d travelled north. For once, he’d been glad of his mask so they couldn’t see the way his gaze turned further inwards the closer they got to their destination. Tenzou had never learnt which village he’d been snatched from. As they passed through each town and hamlet he found himself breathing deeply, searching for a scent or sound that might break down the floodgates in his mind and release his childhood to buoy him up or drown him.

“Are you OK?” Kawaguchi had asked him one evening in their shared room at a village inn. “You’ve been quiet since we left Konoha.”

“Just bored. I hate travelling.” He’d turned away and made a show of rummaging through his pack. Kawaguchi had only hummed in reply, unconvinced but not knowing where to find the cracks to pry him open.

Kawaguchi and Miho didn’t know, of course. Nobody knew what had happened to him bar maybe five people in the whole of Konoha. It was lonely sometimes, but he’d rather bear the secret than the weight of their pity. He couldn’t stand the thought of how they’d look at him if they knew.

They didn’t find the lab, although Tenzou was sure there must be one close by. But they found one of the children. What was left of her.

Her body had been dumped in the woods for the animals to feed on. There was no grave, not even a shallow one; she had been tossed aside like so much rubbish, like her killer had barely spared her a thought once she was no longer useful. Miho had turned away from the body, trying to wave away the flies, but Tenzou had knelt down beside her and taken off his mask. He had to know. He had to see.

It was hard to tell with the state of the body, but he found what he was looking for. The surgical stitches, the scars. The way her fingernails had been clawed off down to the quick. Wherever she’d been held, she’d tried everything to get out.

“Tenzou?” It was Kawaguchi again, staring not at the girl but at him, as though he saw something more awful in Tenzou’s face than in the body on the ground. He put a hand on Tenzou’s shoulder and Tenzou shrugged him off and stood.

“I’m fine.” It came out harsh and he didn’t care. Didn’t look at them, though he noticed when they exchanged a glance behind his back. So what? Anyone would be upset at seeing this.

He meant to tell them who had killed her but his teeth were clenched so tightly that he couldn’t unstick his jaw. They spoke around him, past him, and he didn’t say a single word, and he hated himself for being so broken that he was silenced by a name.

Later, when they had buried the body, they returned to the inn and Tenzou spent thirty minutes under the shower with the heat turned high enough to scald. It didn’t wash away the feeling of that larger hand in his, or rinse the lab’s clinical coldness from his bones.

When he came out of the bathroom, wearing pyjamas, Kawaguchi was sitting on one of the twin beds. The top light was off but one of the bedside lamps was on, casting a dim glow over the sparse room. Tenzou walked past Kawaguchi without looking at him, lying down in his own bed without a word and turning to face the wall.

“You know,” Kawaguchi said lightly, “you could just tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Don’t make me call you a liar, Tenzou.”

“I’m not making you do anything. We don’t have to talk. Just go to sleep.”

There was silence, and for a terrible moment Tenzou thought Kawaguchi might just do that. Might turn off the light and lie down and stop caring, and he wanted that and he hated the thought all at once.

He was so mixed up that he didn’t hear Kawaguchi stand, but he tensed as the edge of the mattress sank down behind him. His jaw was clamped shut again and he didn’t look up.

“OK,” Kawaguchi said softly. “You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong. But can you tell me how I can make it right?”

The sheer impossibility of making any of this right tore a laugh from Tenzou’s throat. It was a bitter sound, but Kawaguchi didn’t flinch away. He sat calmly on the edge of Tenzou’s bed and waited.

“There’s really nothing you can do. We just need to finish this mission, find the rest of the kids and then go home.” His mouth was dry as he said it. He didn’t want to find the rest of the children. If the things he half-remembered were real then they were already past saving.

“And then you’ll be OK, huh?” Kawaguchi asked. “Just like that?”

“Exactly.”

There was another of those silences long enough for Tenzou to both hope and dread that this would be the end of it. Then Kawaguchi let out a long, slow breath.

“All right,” he said. “But if you change your mind, I’m right here.”

This was the end then. The conversation was over. Tenzou closed his eyes and waited to feel Kawaguchi get up and go back over to his own bed. He opened them again when instead he felt gentle fingers card through his hair.

In all of Tenzou’s memories, real, fake or somewhere in between, no one had ever stroked his hair. Perhaps in his earliest childhood his mother or father had sat at his bedside and done so but those moments were lost to him. He lay very still and waited for some sign from Kawaguchi to tell him what this meant and what he supposed to do, but none came. Kawaguchi didn’t say anything, he just sat on the side of Tenzou’s bed and softly stroked his hair.

And very, very slowly, Tenzou let himself relax. The inn around them was quiet, but the silence didn’t force him inside his head to view the dark things that waited there. Kawaguchi’s touch was just enough of a lifeline to keep him grounded in the here and now, and although there were still horrors waiting for him tomorrow, he could remember that the lost children in the woods were not him, were not the ghosts of what he could have been. A hand reached for him, but it would not lead him astray. It belonged to someone who would always bring him home.

Tenzou did not know how long it took for him to fall asleep, but when he drifted off it was with Kawaguchi’s hand still smoothing through his hair and his presence unwavering by his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They don’t find Orochimaru on this mission, and Tenzou’s secret does not come out. Yet.


	4. Lovesick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kawaguchi is pining and Kakashi stages an intervention

Kakashi had never had a gay friend until Tenzou was assigned to Team Phoenix and Kawaguchi entered his life. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known Kawaguchi before then – he’d worked missions with most of ANBU at one point or another – but he’d always been a private person, and he and Tenzou had formed their own little bubble that had been broken when the new director of ANBU had come in and decided to shake things up by dismantling and re-forming all the teams. Tenzou had been reassigned, and Kakashi had found himself drawn into a new bubble, a little larger this time with two new people inside.

He’d never specifically sought out the company of other queer men in the past except for the occasional hook-up or date. It wasn’t a part of himself that he advertised, and so even when they started spending time together, he hadn’t said or done anything that would have outed him to Kawaguchi. Hadn’t seen the point.

Regardless, Kawaguchi had figured him out a couple of months into their friendship. Kakashi still wasn’t quite sure how, and when he’d asked, Kawaguchi had only smiled enigmatically and given him a non-answer.

“I worked in espionage,” he had said. “When you’re deep undercover, being able to read people is the skill that saves your life every day.”

Kakashi had been annoyed at first. Maybe even a little jealous of how easily Kawaguchi moved through the world, flirting with whoever he wanted, not caring who knew or what they thought. Not judging himself. But then, for the first time, he’d experienced what it was like to have a friend who’d flash him a knowing smirk when the cute Academy teacher walked by, or who would amuse him with stories of terrible dates that Kakashi could actually relate to. And, slowly, Kakashi found himself returning the stories, revealing parts of himself he’d never shown to anyone not because he was scared to but because he hadn’t thought they would _get it_.

Kawaguchi got it. Two years in, they could have full conversations about men in the room with a series of looks and gestures. When the latest new recruit had walked into the ANBU office last month, Kawaguchi had whirled around to give Kakashi a wide-eyed stare that meant ‘oh God, _look_ at his biceps’ and Kakashi had raised an eyebrow to say ‘you’re so predictable’. Kawaguchi had flung up both his hands, which meant ‘can you _blame_ me?’ and they’d both glanced back in unison at the hapless new target of Kawaguchi’s affections.

Despite this, it took Kakashi far too long to realise that Kawaguchi had fallen for Tenzou. Kawaguchi had flirted with Tenzou from day one, but he flirted with half the men in ANBU on a daily basis and Kakashi hadn’t taken it seriously. He might never have caught on if not for the henges.

It hadn’t seemed all that strange at first. Henges were one of Kawaguchi’s specialities, and he had an especial predilection for female henges that Kakashi had noted but never questioned too deeply. So it wasn’t too strange when Kawaguchi had asked Miho if he could come to training sessions in one of those henges, to hone his combat skills in a smaller body. Considering that Kawaguchi had been known to hide under the desk to avoid training, Miho had been delighted by this sudden enthusiasm and no one had dared question it in fear of breaking the spell.

But then it had continued. Kawaguchi spent more and more time in female bodies, all with the airy excuse that he was improving his craft. And Kakashi noticed that if Tenzou complimented one henge, Kawaguchi would wear it for the next few days before making some alteration, seeking out Tenzou’s next reaction, looking crestfallen when Tenzou treated him the same as always.

It was the unhealthiest case of pining that Kakashi had ever seen, and he couldn’t stand by and watch any longer. It was time for an intervention.

When he knocked at Kawaguchi’s door that evening, he was unsurprised that Kawaguchi answered in her latest henge: a petite redhead with large hazel eyes and a smattering of freckles across her nose.

“Can we talk?” Kakashi asked.

Kawaguchi stood back to let him in. “If you’re quick. I’m having dinner with someone in about an hour.”

Kakashi gave her another once over as he passed, took note of the nice dress, the make-up, the way she kept anxiously touching her hair. “Tenzou, right?”

“Yeah, actually.” She glanced in the hallway mirror as she passed and looked unhappy with what she saw. “Do you mind if I just…work on this henge a bit while we talk?”

“I do mind,” Kakashi said firmly, and Kawaguchi turned to him in surprise. “That’s what I came to talk to you about. This henge thing. It has to stop.”

Kawaguchi’s eyes widened. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, but there was colour in her cheeks.

Kakashi softened his tone. “Yes you do. I’ve heard of people changing themselves for a guy but this is ridiculous.” Kawaguchi flushed darker and looked away. “What would you do if Tenzou _did_ fall for one of your henges? That isn’t a relationship, that’s a lie that’ll get you both hurt.”

He half-expected her to deny it again, but instead she wrapped her arms around herself and stared fixedly at the wall.

“I know,” she said. “I _know_ it’s stupid but I just…I just want him to look at me like…” She waved a hand, and Kakashi knew what she meant. A lot of men had given her a lot of looks recently – he was fairly sure a swathe of ANBU were in need of a support group for their newfound crises of sexuality – but Tenzou was so used to the henges that he barely reacted to them anymore, and he wasn’t the type to drool over a woman anyway.

“What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned pair of tight jeans?” Kakashi suggested, and Kawaguchi snorted.

“I’ve tried that. It didn’t work.” She groaned and finally met Kakashi’s eye. “Why are straight guys like this? They’re so…so…”

“Straight?”

“Yes! Exactly.” She threw up her hands. “It isn’t fair, Kakashi. I _can_ be a woman. I can be anything – anyone! And it’s driving me crazy because I still can’t get it right! What is it that’s fundamentally undateable about me?”

“You’ve dated half the queer men in Konoha,” Kakashi pointed out, not without sympathy. When Kawaguchi gave him a look, he added, “You know he likes you a lot, right? Maybe not in the way you want but your best chance is just to be yourself.”

“That’s so cheesy,” Kawaguchi groaned. “Can’t you do something? Talk to him for me.”

“Talk to him yourself.”

“I can’t do that! The first rule of crushing on a straight guy is never talk about your crush to the straight guy. That just makes things weird. But you’re his best friend. Can’t you tell him I’m great in bed or something?”

“Because _that_ wouldn’t make things weird.”

Kawaguchi sighed dramatically and flopped against the wall as though she were so lovesick she could barely stand. Kakashi patted her on the head.

“If it’s meant to be then he’ll come around,” he said. “Now let’s get you out of that henge. You know Tenzou would hate it if he knew you didn’t think you were good enough for someone just as you are.”

“But…”

“No buts.” He took her by the shoulders and turned her around and pushed her all the way back into the bedroom before closing the door on her pout. “Don’t come back out until you have balls.”

Kawaguchi laughed, and Kakashi felt somewhat relieved. He couldn’t help with this situation, didn’t even know how he felt about two of his closest friends dating, but if he could at least cheer Kawaguchi up a little bit then he didn’t feel so useless.

When Kawaguchi emerged from the bedroom, he was a he again. Kakashi gave him a suspicious once over, checking for any minor airbrushing, but everything looked natural.

“I see you’re giving the tight jeans another shot,” he commented.

“If I can’t be beautiful then I might as well be booty-full,” Kawaguchi sighed.

“Maybe if you stopped making puns then Tenzou would date you.”

“You just told me to be myself!”

“Yeah, but there’s always room for a little self-improvement.”

Before they could further debate the cons of Kawaguchi’s sense of humour, there was a knock at the door. Kawaguchi froze.

“I thought you were going out to dinner,” Kakashi said.

“Oh, we’re not going anywhere. I asked him to come over and cook for me.”

Kakashi frowned. “He’s never cooked for me.”

There was another knock at the door and Kakashi gave Kawaguchi a helpful push towards it. He noticed that Kawaguchi turned away from the mirror as he passed it, and then he opened the door and revealed Tenzou standing outside with a bag of groceries in his arms.

“Oh,” Tenzou said, sounding surprised. “You’re you again.”

“I usually am.”

“You know what I mean.” Tenzou didn’t step inside even when Kawaguchi moved aside to let him past. He seemed distracted.

“What?” Kawaguchi asked, squirming under the attention. “You’re staring at me.”

Tenzou leaned a hip against the doorframe as though he’d forgotten he was supposed to cross the threshold. “I know we work together every day, but you’ve been wearing henges so often recently that it feels like I haven’t seen you for a while. I guess I missed your face.” He smiled, and Kawaguchi’s cheeks turned pink.

Kakashi decided that was his cue to leave. He patted Kawaguchi on the shoulder as he passed by, and Kawaguchi gave him a helpless glance that Kakashi had never seen before but translated just fine. ‘Help’ it said, ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’

Kakashi tilted his head and raised one shoulder in a half shrug. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ the gesture meant. ‘It might not be so hopeless after all.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The moral of this story is that you should never assume someone's sexuality. Especially when you're wearing tight jeans


	5. 'Tis but a scratch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I told you he’d have a concussion,” Kawaguchi soothed her. “What’s the last thing you remember, Tenzou?”
> 
> “We were…doing ninja stuff,” Tenzou offered.

When Tenzou drifted back to consciousness, his whole world was crystallised in a point of throbbing pain. He was so disoriented that at first he couldn’t pinpoint which part of him was injured. There was simply pain and darkness and that was all he was.

His eyes were glued shut with something sticky and it took effort to prise them open. As sight returned, so did a sense of his body as a physical object he inhabited, and he realised it was his head that hurt. He was lying on the ground, on his side on the grass, and his head was resting on something softer than the stony dirt. There was something wrong with his vision, and colours blurred together: black and green and silver and blue. And red. A lot of red.

Sound came back to him next. There were two voices speaking above him, and it took a little while before the sounds became words and the words became meaningful.

“A concussion is the best we can hope for,” someone said. His voice was slow, as though he was distracted by another task that was taking up most of his concentration. “I’ve siphoned out the blood and stopped the bleeding but I’m not a medic.”

“What about his skull?” another voice asked, more urgent and worried. “Can you heal the bone?”

“Oh yeah. It’s a nice clean break. I’ll get to that in a second, but I can only cast one jutsu at a time.”

Something brushed Tenzou’s head near the painful place and he flinched and made a small sound in the back of his throat.

“He’s awake!” Someone leaned down over him, and his eyes managed to focus enough to make out Miho’s worried face. “Hey. You OK?”

Tenzou made a sound that was definitely not a word but still managed to convey how much pain he was in. Miho looked up at someone behind him.

“Can’t you do something?”

“I’m in the middle of mending a skull fracture,” the other voice said, and after a couple of seconds Tenzou’s brain supplied the name that matched the voice: Kawaguchi. “But maybe I can…OK, hold on, Tenzou. This might feel a little weird.”

Tenzou closed his eyes again. The shifting colours were making him feel sick. There had been a heat radiating against his head that he hadn’t noticed until it faded, and then there was a strange sensation in his temple. The pain grew fuzzy, and there was a pins and needles sensation that turned to numbness. There was still an ache, but the worst of the pain had gone.

“Better?” Kawaguchi asked.

Tenzou cracked his eyes open again. “Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse. Kawaguchi swiped a soothing thumb over his cheek.

“Good. Stay still for me, OK? You took a nasty blow to the head and I need to stitch you back up.”

Tenzou had no desire to move even if he’d been allowed to. The world was slowly coming back into focus and he tried to figure out where they were without moving his head. Miho was kneeling beside him and she took up most of his field of vision, but behind her he could make out the shapes of trees. That’s right, they’d been travelling through the forest. They were out on a mission, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember what the mission had been.

“Which one of you smacked me in the head?” he mumbled, and Kawaguchi snorted.

“We were attacked,” Miho said. “You don’t remember?” She glanced up, looking worried again.

“I told you he’d have a concussion,” Kawaguchi soothed her. “What’s the last thing you remember, Tenzou?”

“We were…doing ninja stuff,” Tenzou offered.

Kawaguchi laughed outright and Miho shot him a reproachful look. There was a slight movement above Tenzou’s head and he glanced up to see Kawaguchi’s hands, glowing softly with some medical jutsu and poised above his temple. Kawaguchi gently pushed his head back down and Tenzou realised belatedly that the soft thing he was using as a pillow was Kawaguchi’s lap.

It was probably a symptom of his head injury that he didn’t really mind.

“I didn’t know you could fix brain damage,” he said.

“You don’t have brain damage,” Kawaguchi said, poking Tenzou in the cheek. “You have a cracked skull.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right then.”

“See, Miho, he’s fine. His sass gland is still in full working order.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Miho said, “the guy who hit you is having an even worse day.”

“He _was_ having a worse day,” Kawaguchi corrected. “For the two minutes he was on fire before he stopped screaming.”

Miho sniffed. “Well, he shouldn’t have picked on Tenzou. He brought it on himself.”

Kawaguchi gently smoothed some of Tenzou’s hair aside, inspecting his head where the wound had been, and then rested a hand on Tenzou’s shoulder.

“OK, I’ve patched you up as best I can. We should definitely take you to the hospital when we get home but I think you’ll be all right.”

“Does that mean I have to move?” Tenzou asked.

Kawaguchi squeezed his shoulder. “No. You can stay right there for as long as you like.”

“Good.” Tenzou closed his eyes. His head still felt partially numb and vaguely headachy and all he wanted to do was sleep.

“Can I clean him up now?” Miho asked.

“I’ll do it if you wet a bandage or something for me.”

Tenzou had almost drifted off again when a damp piece of gauze gently pressed against his cheek. Ah, that’s why his face felt so sticky. He must have bled a lot. Come to think of it, Kawaguchi’s trousers felt sticky too beneath his cheek.

“Did I bleed all over you?” he mumbled.

“Yes, but I don’t mind. I’m always happy to swap bodily fluids with you, Tenzou.”

“Don’t hit on him when he’s brain damaged,” Miho scolded.

“But what if he’s concussed enough to confess his undying love for me? I’ve gotta use my window of opportunity.”

“I’ll never be that concussed,” Tenzou said.

“Shhh,” Kawaguchi hushed him, wiping more blood away from his forehead. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Even if I had five head injuries, I would never be that concussed.”

“He’s delusional,” Kawaguchi said. “It’s the brain damage talking.”

Miho rolled her eyes. “If you like, you can use my pack as a pillow instead,” she offered.

Kawaguchi tipped some more water from a canteen onto the bandage, wrung it out and started working the blood from Tenzou’s hair. He was very patient, dabbing at each matted lock so gently that it didn’t hurt at all. It was soothing, and Tenzou felt himself relaxing as though Kawaguchi was teasing the tension out of his body along with the blood from his hair.

“I’m fine right here,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kawaguchi's dad is a medic so he's pretty good at medical ninjutsu


	6. I feel faint...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They had almost made it back to the village before Kawaguchi ran out of chakra.

They had almost made it back to the village before Kawaguchi ran out of chakra. The light was starting to fade from the sky and Miho had pushed them hard to get them home before night fell, despite the fact that they had finished their mission only this morning. They’d tracked down a group of bounty hunters who’d been targeting shinobi with bloodline limits. Tenzou had used his mokuton as bait, but they’d turned out to be a well-organised and powerful team, used to targeting jounin at the top of their class.

Though some miracle, they’d come through the ensuing fight with only minor injuries, but Kawaguchi didn’t have the chakra reserves that Tenzou and Miho did, and it was clear that holding his own had wiped him out. He’d insisted he was well enough to make the journey home, but they’d had to take more breaks than usual and it was clear he was running on empty.

The last break was within sight of the village walls, to Miho’s chagrin.

“We’re almost there,” she coaxed him. “You can be home in twenty minutes.”

Tenzou, who had a lot of second-hand experience with this sort of thing, recognised the ashen pallor of Kawaguchi’s skin and the slight trembling in his hands.

“He’s not going to make it,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Kawaguchi insisted, still trying to catch his breath. “I just need five minutes.”

Tenzou crossed the path to stand right beside him, waiting patiently.

“What are you…?” Kawaguchi trailed off, and Tenzou caught him as he fainted and gently lowered him to the ground.

“Nice catch,” Miho said, crouching down beside them and removing Kawaguchi’s mask.

“I used to be on Team Hound, remember?” Tenzou said, pressing a finger to Kawaguchi’s wrist and counting the beats of his pulse. “This almost feels nostalgic.”

“I’ll be sure to thank Kakashi for training you so well.” She sat back on her heels and glanced towards Konoha. The walls were catching the strong evening light but soon the sun would set and the road would be cast into darkness. “Do you think he’ll come around if we let him lie down for a few minutes?”

“There’s no point waiting when we’re so close,” Tenzou said. “I’ll carry him. He needs to sleep it off anyway.”

He removed Kawaguchi’s armour to lighten the load, sealing it into a storage scroll. Then he slid one arm under Kawaguchi’s shoulder blades and the other under his knees and carefully cradled him against his chest. Kawaguchi’s head lolled against his shoulder. He didn’t stir.

“I could help put him on your back if that’s easier,” Miho said.

“He isn’t heavy and we’re not going far. I’d rather have him where I can check on his breathing. Just in case.”

“He _is_ OK, isn’t he?” Miho asked. She touched Kawaguchi’s forehead and his cheek. “He’s very pale.”

“He’ll be fine. Trust me, I’ve seen _much_ worse than this.”

Without Kawaguchi slowing them down, they reached the village walls in no time. They paused outside the gate so that Miho could adjust Kawaguchi’s mask, not quite covering his face but obscuring it enough that his face was hidden between it and Tenzou’s chest.

“Should we take him to his parents’ place?” she asked.

“I’ll take him home with me. I don’t mind looking after him for a couple of days.”

“I assume you’ve had a lot of practice at that too.”

“Far too much,” Tenzou sighed.

Miho squeezed his shoulder. “Thanks, Tenzou. I’ll get you both a day of sick leave and I’ll come check in on you in the morning.”

She walked Tenzou home and helped him unlock his door, and then when he was safely inside she left him to it. The house was dusky with evening light, and Tenzou breathed in the familiar scent of home, always a comfort after a mission away. Kawaguchi was a warm weight in his arms, and Tenzou could feel soft puffs of breath on his collar bone as he carried him through the house, nudging the bedroom door open and then laying him down carefully on the bed.

The last of the golden evening light was slanting in through the window, catching in Kawaguchi’s hair. His skin was still very white, and Tenzou placed his ANBU mask on the bedside table before checking his vitals again. His pulse was slow but steady, and when he laid a hand on Kawaguchi’s cheek, his skin was cool to the touch.

“You better not be faking so I’ll take care of you,” he said. “Though the silence is a nice change. I could get used to that.”

Kawaguchi didn’t stir, so Tenzou laid a blanket over him, tucking it up over his shoulders, then paused for one last moment by the foot of the bed before quietly left the room. Kakashi had always been like this too: dead to the world until he’d slept off the initial exhaustion. Tenzou wasn’t worried, but as he went about making dinner, he found himself breaking off from cooking to do little things that might make Kawaguchi more comfortable. He filled a glass of water and took it into the bedroom in case Kawaguchi woke up and was thirsty, and then he opened the bedroom window to let in some fresh air, and then he turned the heating on in case the fresh air was too cold.

Once he’d eaten and put away the leftovers to heat up for Kawaguchi later, he took a quick shower and then grabbed a book and went through into the bedroom. He switched on the bedside lamp, bathing the room in dim yellow light, and sat beside Kawaguchi’s sleeping body. Kawaguchi was breathing so softly that Tenzou couldn’t hear it, but he could see his chest rising and falling beneath the blanket. It was strangely peaceful to have a second quiet presence in the room with him, and Tenzou let the book hang loosely from his fingers as he simply sat and watched Kawaguchi sleep for a while.

It wasn’t like it was the first time he’d seen Kawaguchi sleeping. On missions they often ended up sharing a room if they had to stay over at an inn, or they would share a tent if camping in the wild. Hell, it wasn’t unheard of for Kawaguchi to simply lay his head down on his desk in the office and take a power nap. Tenzou already knew how long his eyelashes were against his cheek, had noticed the faint freckles that appeared in summer, had thought more than once that he looked younger when his features were relaxed. But somehow, for all the familiarity, he still found it hard to tear his gaze away.

On an impulse, he reached out and brushed Kawaguchi’s fringe away from his eyes. His hair was constantly a little too long but it suited him. Tenzou let his fingers linger against the soft strands. He had looked at Kawaguchi’s sleeping face plenty, but he rarely got to touch.

Kawaguchi’s eyelashes fluttered, and Tenzou withdrew his hand.

“Hey,” he said softly, and Kawaguchi turned towards his voice, shifting under the blanket. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Kawaguchi mumbled. “Did I pass out?”

“Yep. I told you so, by the way.”

Kawaguchi groaned and rolled onto his side to face Tenzou, his eyes only half open. “Did you catch me, at least?”

“No, I let you face plant the ground and then stepped on you for good measure.”

“And then dragged me home by my ankles?”

“By the hair. You need to get it cut, by the way.”

“Tenzou, I’m an invalid, you’re not allowed to trash talk my hair.” A hand snuck out from under the blanket and poked Tenzou in the hip.

“You’re the one who insisted you were fine to travel home today,” Tenzou chided. “Take better care of yourself next time.”

“But what if I prefer you taking care of me?” The hand did not retreat, resting on the mattress beside Tenzou with the little finger touching his thigh, as though a point of contact, no matter how small, was a comfort.

“You don’t have to run yourself into the ground for my attention.” When Kawaguchi didn’t reply, Tenzou added, more gently, “Do you need anything? Food, water?”

Kawaguchi shook his head and closed his eyes again. “I don’t want to move. I’m so tired.”

“Try and get some more sleep then. I’ll be here, so wake me up if you need anything in the night.”

“Thanks,” Kawaguchi murmured. “Sorry for being a pain.”

Tenzou rested his hand over Kawaguchi’s and squeezed gently. “You’re not a pain. I’ll look after you whenever you need me to.”

Kawaguchi made a sleepy sound and hooked one of his fingers over Tenzou’s thumb. Tenzou watched him as his breathing evened out, until he was sleeping deeply again.

He looked down at their hands, not quite joined. He doubted Kawaguchi would wake if he pulled away, but there was something sweet about the way Kawaguchi had wanted to touch him and it made him hesitate. He looked again at Kawaguchi’s face, a strand of hair caught in his eyelashes and his other hand curled on the pillow in front of him.

Quietly, he thumbed open the book and settled back against the pillows to read one-handed, Kawaguchi breathing softly at his side.


	7. I'll protect you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tenzou hated infiltration missions. This was partly because he lacked the people skills to easily connect with strangers and gain their trust, and partly because it meant he had to watch his teammates get very close to very dangerous people. And ‘very close’ in Kawaguchi’s case was sometimes a hell of an understatement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for this one - a character is in a situation where she's receiving unwanted sexual advances. There is no sexual assault but there are some predatory vibes so skip this one if you'd rather stay clear of that.

One of the unofficial rules of ANBU was that if you had a tokubetsu jounin on your team then you could expect to go on a lot of missions related to their speciality. Unlike the regular jounin who made up the majority of ANBU’s ranks, the tokujo had been recruited for their specific skillset instead of their brute strength, so they tended to be teamed up with the heavy hitters to balance out any deficiencies in their general ninjutsu.

This was how Tenzou came to be working more than his fair share of infiltration and information-gathering missions. On the plus side, his working life was suddenly far less violent than it had been in the past. On the minus side, he was really, _really_ bad at infiltration missions.

This was partly because he lacked the people skills to easily connect with strangers and gain their trust, and partly because it meant he had to watch his teammates get very close to very dangerous people. And ‘very close’ in Kawaguchi’s case was sometimes a hell of an understatement.

Their latest mission had taken them all the way to Kusagakure, the Hidden Grass Village. There was a sizeable population of Konoha immigrants living here, many of them wealthy and influential, and several involved in espionage. Team Phoenix had been sent to investigate a certain shinobi named Iwamoto, who had strong links to Konoha and was suspected of smuggling valuable items out of the village to sell on through the black market. Most of the items were only of historical and cultural value – ceremonial clan weapons, scrolls and other historical documents from the founding of the village – but the clans who had suffered thefts were placing a lot of pressure on the hokage to retrieve the stolen goods and punish the perpetrators.

And so Tenzou found himself at Iwamoto’s lavish house in Kusagakure, attending a party and trying to socialise with the local elite shinobi. He was more at home in an interrogation, where you got to ask direct questions like ‘have you purchased any objects of suspicious origin from the owner of this house?’, but apparently that wasn’t acceptable cocktail party etiquette and so he was leaving most of the talking to Miho. They were undercover as a husband and wife – he was always paired with either her or Kawaguchi in these situations because he couldn’t be trusted to do anything useful alone – and every now and then she would step on his foot to let him know he was very obviously scanning the room for Kawaguchi again.

It was just as well he had been ignoring his group’s conversation and trying to spot Kawaguchi though, because otherwise he wouldn’t have noticed Iwamoto discreetly leaving the room with a pretty blonde woman on his arm. A pretty blonde woman who was usually Tenzou’s male teammate.

He excused himself from the group, ignoring Miho’s frown, and hurried after them. No one paid him any attention as he slipped out through the same door Kawaguchi had taken. The hallway he entered was unlit and no one was in sight, but of the four doors that lined the walls, only one was ajar, spilling a crack of light out into the dark hall.

Tenzou moved cautiously down the hallway, the expensive carpet muffling his footsteps, and nudged the door open a little wider. Just enough for him to peek through the gap and spot Iwamoto and Kawaguchi standing by an antique desk, looking down at something together. From the little Tenzou could make out, the room was a study, lined with bookshelves and lit by an expensive-looking lamp that cast a warm glow over the desk.

“It’s beautiful,” Kawaguchi was saying. Tenzou couldn’t see what she was looking at, but he was more concerned with Iwamoto’s hand, which rested on the small of her back as she examined something in the lamplight. “This was really owned by the infamous Uchiha clan?”

“This is their clan symbol embossed in the hilt.” Iwamoto pointed to something on the desk. “I’d offer to let you hold it, but I never trust a beautiful woman with a blade.”

Kawaguchi laughed. She turned to look up at him and the lamplight caught her hair, honey blonde tresses that hung loose around her bare shoulders. Her dress was black and well-fitted, and although the skirt reached her knees, in Iwamoto’s presence it suddenly seemed too short.

“I get the feeling there’s a story behind that,” she said. “Do you impress a lot of women with your collection? I’m assuming you _have_ a collection.”

“Oh, I’m not a collector,” Iwamoto said. “I’m a businessman. I sell to collectors.”

Kawaguchi touched his arm. “Must be lucrative. Do you specialise in weapons?”

There was a soft noise from down the hallway and Tenzou tensed and turned around, but it was only Miho, closing the door on the party behind her. She looked cross, and Tenzou put a finger to his lips before she could berate him for sneaking off without her. He glanced again into the study and then retreated down the hallway to meet her out of earshot of Iwamoto.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Miho hissed. “I told you – the two of us are looking for buyers among the guests, Kawaguchi is going after Iwamoto. By herself.”

“They went off alone together,” Tenzou protested in a whisper. “What if she needs back up?”

“This isn’t that kind of mission. She doesn’t need you getting in her way, she needs you to give her space to do her thing.”

“He has his hands all over her!”

“She’s a big girl, Tenzou, she can look after herself.” She gestured towards the door. “Let’s go back to the party before someone wonders where we ran off to.”

There was a quiet thump from the study. Tenzou whirled around and made it back to the study door before Miho had chance to stop him. She darted after him and grabbed his arm, digging her nails in as best she could through his suit jacket.

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed.

But Tenzou wasn’t listening. In the study, Iwamoto had Kawaguchi backed up against the desk and he was kissing her. Kawaguchi had a hand on his shoulder, and she wasn’t pushing him away but she wasn’t encouraging him either. Tenzou clenched the doorframe so tightly he could feel it digging grooves into his palm.

Iwamoto pulled back a little, one of his hands on Kawaguchi’s waist and sliding slowly up towards her chest. “I’ve shown you mine,” he murmured. “It’s only fair that you show me yours.”

Kawaguchi curled a hand around his wrist. “You haven’t even bought me dinner yet,” she said lightly. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

Now she did try to push him away, but he was bigger than her and he didn’t budge.

“I’ll take you to dinner tomorrow,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking about taking that dress off you all evening. Don’t make me wait.”

Miho was tugging at Tenzou’s arm more and more insistently. “Tenzou, she can handle it. Tenzou!”

Iwamoto tried to kiss Kawaguchi again but she turned her head, and as she did so Tenzou caught sight of her expression. Kawaguchi’s face was always expressive, whether in a henge or not, but right now her features were wiped blank. She had shut some part of herself down, and it was that more than anything that set off a blaring alarm in Tenzou that could not be ignored. He’d flung the door open and torn himself free from Miho’s grasp before he’d had chance to think about it, with no plan more sophisticated than to rip the bastard’s hands off Kawaguchi and possibly remove his arms from their sockets just for good measure.

He never got the chance. At the sound of the door, Iwamoto whirled around, but before he could say anything Kawaguchi jabbed something into his neck with a sharp, fluid strike and he crumpled to the ground at her feet, the senbon sticking out of his neck.

“For God’s sake, Tenzou,” Miho snapped behind him. She stepped into the room and closed the door. “I told you she could handle it! You just fucked up this entire mission, you realise that?”

Tenzou turned on her, just as angry. “He was assaulting Kawaguchi!”

“No he wasn’t. He was being pushy, not violent. It was nowhere near the point where you needed to get involved.”

“Tenzou, I’m fine,” Kawaguchi said. She stepped over Iwamoto’s prone form and hurried over to him. “Really. I’m OK.”

“You didn’t look OK. You didn’t want him to touch you like that.”

Kawaguchi glanced away. She pressed her lips together, clearly uncomfortable, and Tenzou wasn’t sure if it was because of what had happened with Iwamoto or because he had witnessed it.

“Tenzou,” Miho said, “this might be news to you, but when you’re a woman – or you look like a woman – this shit happens. No, we don’t want it to, no we don’t like it, but we live in a world where some men are shitty and we have to accept that and get on with the job.”

“But we don’t have to do it like this,” Tenzou argued. “Have you thought that maybe you’re being a shitty captain sending Kawaguchi off with creepy guys to –”

“Tenzou, stop.” Kawaguchi stepped between them and put her hands on Tenzou’s chest as though to physically hold back his anger. “Please. This isn’t the time for this conversation.”

Miho was glaring at him over Kawaguchi’s shoulder, and Tenzou was certain they’d be having this argument in full later, but then she squared her shoulders and turned away, stalking over to the desk.

“We might as well take whatever he has,” she said. “What’s the senbon laced with?”

“A sedative.” Kawaguchi was still looking up at Tenzou. “He’ll be out for an hour or so.”

“Good. I’ll search the desk and then we’re getting the hell out of here.”

Tenzou didn’t move to help her. He rested a hand on Kawaguchi’s arm. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.

Kawaguchi slid her hands up to Tenzou’s shoulders and squeezed. “Yes,” she said. “I think he would have stopped if I’d been more insistent. But I can defend myself if I need to. I would never let someone assault me.”

“Even if you’re ordered to?”

“No one has ever ordered me to sleep with a guy for a mission,” Kawaguchi said firmly. “And if they did, I’d refuse. I promise you, Tenzou, that no one is making me do anything I didn’t sign up for.”

“I still don’t like it. What if something did go badly wrong and Miho and I weren’t here? You could get hurt.”

“I’m a shinobi. Every mission we do carries a risk.” She tilted her head to one side, considering him. “Just because I look smaller and weaker like this, it doesn’t mean I’m any less capable. I have five more senbon sewn into the lining of this dress and I know three different ways I could have killed him with my bare hands before he had chance to fight back.”

Tenzou felt himself colour. “I didn’t mean to imply you were weak. Fuck, am I being really patronising right now?”

“A little overprotective, maybe,” Kawaguchi said. She smiled, and despite the henge there was something in her face that reminded Tenzou of her real smile. Some quirk of expression that was pure Kawaguchi. “But I’d rather have an overprotective teammate than one who stands back and watches me get hurt.”

She rose up onto her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. It was a soft kiss, barely more than a brush of her lips against his skin, yet the sensation lingered even after she’d flashed him one more smile and turned away to go and help Miho. Tenzou found himself watching her as she bent to pluck the senbon from Iwamoto’s neck and then casually stepped on his hand as she joined Miho in raiding his desk. Then he moved to the doorway to keep watch, feeling both chastised and completely certain that if this happened in a thousand more missions, he’d protect her every time.


	8. Oh the weather outside is frightful

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kawaguchi threw up his free hand. “Tenzou, we’ve _seen_ this horror film! Remember, the monster in the woods that ate all those ANBU? Remember what happened to the ones who thought it would be a good idea to hide out in the creepy abandoned house?”
> 
> Tenzou stared at him for a moment and then snorted.
> 
> “I’m serious!” Kawaguchi insisted. “This has got bad horror movie decision written all over it.”

The sky above the forest was so black with clouds that Tenzou could no longer tell how much time there was left before sunset. Perhaps an hour, perhaps two. In the shadows of the trees, visibility was already so low that he would have called it a day if not for the burgeoning storm. The heavens hadn’t opened yet, but the wind was whistling through the pines with a low, mournful sound, and the temperature had dropped steadily since they’d entered the forest three hours ago.

“We should pitch camp now,” Kawaguchi said. “We’re not going to find better shelter and I really don’t want to be caught in the rain.”

Tenzou glanced up through the branches at the sky. “I don’t understand where we went wrong. We should have come out the other side of the woods an hour ago.”

“We can worry about navigating tomorrow. If we carry on through the night we’ll get soaked and even more lost.” Kawaguchi stopped walking and glanced around. The underbrush was thick, tough to walk through and completely unsuitable for pitching a tent. “If you did the wood thing then maybe you could build us a –”

He was cut off by a flash of lightning, followed immediately by a boom of thunder so loud that it seemed to shake the ground. As though the lightning had ripped apart the sky, the clouds finally burst, rain falling in bucketfulls of fat drops that soaked them within seconds. Kawaguchi moved closer to Tenzou’s side, his hair plastered to his face.

“Great,” he said. “This is exactly how I wanted to end my day.”

There was another flash of lightning, and a shape among the trees was lit up for a split second. Tenzou squinted through the darkness, sure he’d seen it but not daring to hope that it could be what he thought it was.

“Let’s head that way,” he said, pointing towards it.

“Are you crazy? We can’t keep going in this!”

“I saw something not too far away. I think it was a house.”

Kawaguchi stared at him. “Who the hell would build a house out here?”

Tenzou shrugged and started walking again. The ground was already turning to thick mud that sucked at his boots. “I don’t know but it’s worth checking out. Unless you want to try pitching a tent in this.”

Between the rain and the dusk, they could barely see more than a few feet ahead, and Kawaguchi stuck very close to him as they struggled through the downpour, stumbling over the uneven ground. After a few steps, Kawaguchi grabbed his hand, and Tenzou didn’t protest. They were already lost – the idea of getting separated was too much to bear.

They walked for long enough that Tenzou started to think he’d been mistaken after all, but then another lightning strike rent the sky in two and he saw clearly a wooden cabin among the trees, no more than a few hundred yards ahead. Judging by Kawaguchi’s intake of breath, he’d seen it too.

“Told you so,” Tenzou said. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s home but at this point I’m not above breaking in. The owners will have to understand.” He took another step, but Kawaguchi clutched his hand tighter and didn’t move.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” he said.

Tenzou turned to him impatiently. “How exactly is finding shelter for the night a bad idea?”

“You don’t think it’s weirdly convenient that we stumble upon a cabin in the middle of the woods? Nothing about this seems vaguely sinister to you?”

“What seems sinister is your insistence on keeping me out in the rain for longer than I need to be. What exactly is the problem?”

Kawaguchi threw up his free hand. “Tenzou, we’ve _seen_ this horror film! Remember, the monster in the woods that ate all those ANBU? Remember what happened to the ones who thought it would be a good idea to hide out in the creepy abandoned house?”

Tenzou stared at him for a moment and then snorted.

“I’m serious!” Kawaguchi insisted. “This has got bad horror movie decision written all over it.”

“If I remember correctly, the monster ate at least two of them while they were still in the woods. It could have been stalking us for miles now, waiting for us to tire so it can pick us off in our sleep.”

Kawaguchi shuddered visibly and squeezed Tenzou’s hand. “Why are you like this?”

Tenzou leaned closer so he could speak in a low voice by Kawaguchi’s ear. “It’s so dark that there could be a monster watching us right now and we’d never see it. It could be right behind you…”

“Tenzou!” Kawaguchi clung to his arm and Tenzou laughed outright.

“So the only question is whether you’d rather be hunted through the woods in the rain or torn to pieces in the shelter of a nice dry house.”

“I hate you. I hate you so much.”

“That’s no way to talk to the guy who _might_ protect you from monsters if you’re nice to him.”

“Tenzou,” Kawaguchi whined. He was giving Tenzou the kicked puppy look that Tenzou was so familiar with, but it had an especially pitiful quality when he also looked half-drowned.

“If you let me get out of the rain, I’ll protect you from house monsters,” he said. “But if you want to stay out here then you’re on your own with the forest monsters. Sound fair?”

“I guess,” Kawaguchi grumbled. He didn’t let go of Tenzou’s arm as Tenzou led the way towards the cabin, and Tenzou caught him glancing back over his shoulder a couple of times at the rain-drenched, shadowy woods.

The cabin was locked but not warded, and it was a simple task to pick the lock and let themselves in to stand dripping in the hallway. It was dark inside, and when Tenzou tried the light switch, nothing happened. The air smelt damp and dusty, as though no one had stepped foot inside for a long time.

Kawaguchi was still clinging to Tenzou and seemed unlikely to let go any time soon.

“We are _so_ going to die here,” he muttered.

“We might as well dry off before we’re killed then,” Tenzou said. “Let’s take a look around.”

“No basements,” Kawaguchi said as they made their way towards the first doorway. “And no attics. And don’t open any wardrobes or look under any beds.”

“You’ve learnt a lot from movie nights.”

“I take my continued survival very seriously.”

They moved slowly through the house, trying not to stumble over anything in the gloom. There was a staircase leading up to a shadowy second floor, but they passed it and let themselves into a large room that Tenzou thought might be a living room. He could just about make out the indistinct shapes of furniture. Kawaguchi finally let go of him and fumbled in his pack before withdrawing a seal, which lit up with a soft glow.

The room was not as large as it had felt in the dark, but it was bigger than Tenzou would have suspected from the outside view of the cabin. The wooden walls were unadorned and the floor was bare apart from a fur rug, which had been rolled up and covered with a dust sheet. There was another dust sheet over the sofa, which sat opposite a large fireplace, the hearth bare but looking reasonably clean.

“This is a nice place,” Tenzou said, heading straight for the fireplace. “Probably to lull us into a false sense of security. The bodies of other lost travellers must be in another room.”

Kawaguchi flipped him off and shut the door behind them. The heavy curtains over the window were already drawn, and the rain drummed loudly against the glass. Tenzou brought his hands together, and a moment later the fireplace was filled with logs and kindling, which he lit with a fire jutsu.

The warmth lured Kawaguchi over, and he knelt before the fire and shivered.

“Maybe this is slightly better than being outside,” he admitted. “I still have a bad feeling though.”

“Because you’re cold and wet and tired,” Tenzou said. He started to unclip his armour. “You’ll feel better once we’ve changed into dry clothes and warmed up.”

“I’m not sure I have any dry clothes,” Kawaguchi said, looking down at his pack. A small pool of water was forming on the floor around it. “Everything is soaked.”

Tenzou glanced at his own pack. It was waterproof to a degree, but not watertight, and he suspected the deluge had made its way in amongst all his supplies as well. He glanced over at Kawaguchi, noting how much he was shivering despite the fire as he took off his armour. They couldn’t stay drenched like this. The fire wouldn’t dry them out quickly enough, and neither of them could afford to get sick when they had another hard day’s slog through the forest tomorrow.

“I’ll go take a look around upstairs,” he said, standing up. “I’m sure there’ll be some blankets at least.”

Kawaguchi dropped the leg guard he’d been holding in his haste to also stand. “No,” he said emphatically.

“No?”

“You can’t leave me alone in here! I can’t believe you own literally a million horror films and you still haven’t learnt the cardinal rule: don’t split up. Bad things happen when groups split up.”

“You can come with me if you want,” Tenzou offered, and Kawaguchi looked even more horrified.

“Oh yeah, wandering around a scary dark house definitely won’t end badly.”

Tenzou knew he only had himself to blame. He shouldn’t have tried to scare Kawaguchi – it had worked too well and now it was backfiring. He rested his hands on Kawaguchi’s shoulders and squeezed gently.

“Kawaguchi, it’s just an empty house,” he soothed. “I’ll be gone for ten minutes tops. Nothing will happen.”

Above them, a floorboard creaked.

Together, they fell silent and looked up. There was a long pause, the only noise the storm battering the outside of the cabin, and then there was another, quieter creak, like someone trying to move stealthily across the floor.

“There really is something here,” Kawaguchi whispered.

“Or someone,” Tenzou muttered. “Maybe the owner is home after all.”

“With no electricity and dust sheets over the furniture?”

“OK, then it’s another traveller who got lost and stumbled across this place.”

“What are the chances of that, do you think?”

They were low, Tenzou had to admit, but higher than the chances of there being an ungodly creature who wanted to rip them limb from limb.

“I’ll go take a look,” he said. “You stay here.”

“No way,” Kawaguchi hissed. “I’m not sending you off to your death. What if we just stay here and think happy thoughts? Maybe it’ll just go away.”

“I’m going,” Tenzou said firmly. “You can either come with me or stay behind. Your choice.” He moved towards the door, and Kawaguchi only hesitated for a moment before following.

After the light of the fire, the hallway seemed even darker. It felt colder too, and Tenzou’s clothes clung unpleasantly to his skin, but he tried to ignore his discomfort, moving as lightly as he could and listening closely for any other sounds from upstairs. He left the lounge door ajar so that a little light spilled out through the crack and illuminated the first few stairs, although they would have no choice but to climb up into pitch darkness.

“I still have the light seal,” Kawaguchi whispered, but Tenzou shook his head.

“Better not to announce ourselves too soon.”

“If someone’s here then they’ve already heard us.”

“Hopefully they’re more scared of us than we are of them.”

“Unlikely,” Kawaguchi said under his breath.

They climbed the stairs very slowly, Tenzou taking the lead and Kawaguchi right on his heels, keeping close to the edge of the steps to try and minimise the chances of more creaky floorboards. Halfway up, they heard a skittering sound from above, like claws on wood, and Kawaguchi grabbed Tenzou’s hand and squeezed.

“You’ll have to let go if there’s someone up here,” Tenzou breathed.

“That’s not a someone,” Kawaguchi whispered. “That’s a some _thing_.”

As much as he didn’t want to, Tenzou was inclined to agree.

They reached the top of the stairs and were faced with a landing that was every bit as dark as the staircase. Tenzou could just make out a large window set into one of the walls, although true night had fallen outside and it was mostly by the sound of the rain that he could discern it. He stood at the top of the stairway, squinting and trying to get his bearings, not sure if he was glad for Kawaguchi’s presence close behind him or if he should turn and send him back down to safety, just in case.

A flash of lightning lit up the landing, and something darted through one of the open doorways into a bedroom. Kawaguchi clutched at the back of his shirt and buried his face in Tenzou’s shoulder, swearing under his breath. He was squeezing Tenzou’s hand so tightly that it was painful.

“Stay here,” Tenzou murmured. “I’m going to go take a look.”

“No!” Kawaguchi tightened his hold on Tenzou’s shirt. “Tenzou, I really, really don’t like this.”

“I know.” He stroked a thumb over the back of Kawaguchi’s hand. His own heart was beating hard but one of them had to go check it out. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t big. And I promised when we watched that film that I’d protect you from monsters, remember?”

“I didn’t think you’d really have to!”

“As it happens, fighting monsters is one of my specialities so you don’t have to worry.” It was true enough. He’d been trained to take down jinchuuriki, so if there really was some evil spirit in the house, he didn’t rate its chances. He tried to gently remove his hand from Kawaguchi’s, but Kawaguchi didn’t let go. “Kawaguchi, I need my hand back.”

“I don’t want you to get eaten by a monster,” Kawaguchi said into his shoulder. He sounded genuinely upset and Tenzou was touched.

“If I’m getting eaten, I’ll yell and you can come save me.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Sorry.” Tenzou leaned his cheek against the top of Kawaguchi’s head. His hair was still wet but Tenzou didn’t mind. “Hey, we’re in a house made of wood in the middle of the forest. This is _my_ territory. You really think some monster’s going to beat me here?”

Kawaguchi lifted his head a little. “Depends how many teeth it has.”

“You really are cute when you’re scared.”

Kawaguchi made a scoffing sound, but he finally loosened his grip on Tenzou’s hand, not quite letting go but giving him the chance to pull away. “You’re not scared?”

“There are worse things in this world than monsters.”

Kawaguchi uncurled his hand from Tenzou’s shirt and lifted his head fully from Tenzou’s shoulder, though he pressed his face briefly into Tenzou’s neck and murmured “please don’t get eaten” before taking a half step back. Tenzou squeezed his hand one last time and then transferred his attention over to the doorway through which the monster had gone.

He approached as quietly as he could, and once he got close to the open door he heard the scuffling sound of animal movement from inside. There was definitely something in there. Whether it was dangerous was another question. He hesitated at the doorframe, and then whirled around the corner, hands ready to form a jutsu.

Something ran into the far corner of the room. It was too dark to see it clearly but Tenzou thought it was the size of a dog. He paused, uncertain if it posed a threat, and then there was another flash of lightning and he caught sight of red fur, a long muzzle and gleaming eyes. He let out a relieved puff of air, the tension draining from his shoulders.

“It’s a fox,” he called softly back through the doorway, and then realised that Kawaguchi was standing right outside, tense and unwilling but apparently incapable of sending Tenzou into possible danger alone.

“You’re sure?” Kawaguchi asked, sounding like he’d rather be anywhere else.

“I’m sure. God knows how it got in but there’s nothing dangerous in here.”

Kawaguchi’s shoulders slumped and he let out a long sigh. “Oh, thank God. I didn’t want you to die tonight.”

Tenzou’s lips quirked up in a smile, invisible in the darkness. “I didn’t much feel like dying either.” He turned back to the fox, which was huddled into the corner looking as scared as though it thought he was the monster. “If you’re brave enough to go back downstairs by yourself, you should go sit by the fire. I’ll see if I can take the fox outside and find some blankets.”

“I’ll look for blankets if you deal with the fox.”

“You sure you want to risk it? There might be a real monster in one of the other rooms.”

“Tenzou! Why would you say that?”

Tenzou grinned. “What can I say, I’m a sadist.”

It turned out that Kawaguchi did have the courage to search the other bedrooms by himself while Tenzou used his mokuton to guide the fox down the stairs, scaring it half to death in the process, and opened the front door to let it out into the night. He wasn’t sure it was a kindness to let it out into the storm, but at least he was paying for his stay in the cabin by ensuring the owners didn’t come back to more damage than the fox had already done to their house.

When he opened the lounge door he found that Kawaguchi had already slipped back inside and was standing by the fire, his back to Tenzou, peeling his wet shirt off over his head. Tenzou paused in the doorway, watching as Kawaguchi ran a hand through his damp hair and then reached down to unfasten his trousers. Feeling suddenly voyeuristic, Tenzou closed the door behind him a little harder than necessary to announce his presence and looked over at the couch to focus his gaze on something else. Kawaguchi had removed the dust sheet, and a single blanket was draped over the cushions.

“Is that all you could find?” Tenzou asked, lifting a corner. It wasn’t the thickest blanket in the world, but at least they had the fire.

“When the owners left, they took all the bedding with them,” Kawaguchi said. “I found that stuffed in a bag in the back of a cupboard. It seems clean enough, so we’ll just have to share.”  
Tenzou glanced back at him and discovered that Kawaguchi had stripped to his boxers and was laying his clothes out in front of the fire to dry. He seemed much calmer now than he’d been before, which was ironic because Tenzou was suddenly much more nervous than he’d been about the supposed monster. It wasn’t like he’d never stripped down in front of Kawaguchi before – he changed in the locker rooms in the ANBU offices almost every day – but in the quiet house with just the two of them, it felt a lot more intimate.

Kawaguchi touched the waistband of his boxers as though he were considering removing those too and Tenzou closed his eyes.

“We are _not_ getting naked,” he said.

“But my underwear is damp too!”

“We’re sharing a blanket!”

“I’ll say no homo if it makes you feel better.”

“No,” Tenzou said flatly.

Kawaguchi sighed loudly, and although Tenzou still had his eyes closed, he felt him tug the blanket from his hands.

“Fine,” Kawaguchi said from about a foot away, and Tenzou risked cracking his eyes open. “Take your clothes off and come have almost-naked blanket cuddles.” He laughed at Tenzou’s expression, then wrapped the blanket around himself and curled up on the couch, still grinning.

“You’re in a much better mood,” Tenzou grumbled as he turned away and pulled off his own shirt. Kawaguchi wolf whistled and Tenzou flipped him off without looking round.

“I didn’t get eaten,” Kawaguchi said cheerfully. “Not even a little bit! Turns out you keep your promises after all.”

“I can’t believe you doubted me.” Tenzou shed his own trousers and laid them out next to Kawaguchi’s, then half turned awkwardly towards him. Kawaguchi held open the blanket at his side in invitation.

“Don’t act more scared of me than you were of the monster,” Kawaguchi said. “I’ll get a complex.”

Tenzou told himself his face felt hot because he’d been too close to the fire, and he studiously didn’t make eye contact as he sat beside Kawaguchi on the couch, draping the blanket around his own shoulder. He’d tried to leave a couple of inches between them, but Kawaguchi immediately snuggled up to his side, tucking his feet up on the couch under the blanket too in such a way that his knees half rested on Tenzou’s lap. There was a lot of warm, damp skin-to-skin contact, and for some reason this produced far more adrenaline in Tenzou’s system than the monster had.

“You said I could cuddle up when we watch horror films,” Kawaguchi said as he rested his head on Tenzou’s shoulder, “so I figure the rule should be the same now we’re _in_ a horror film.”

“I already saved you from the monster. The movie is over.”

“There could always be a terrible sequel. Attack of the Monster 2: This Time It’s a Raccoon.”

“Next time I’ll let it get you,” Tenzou mumbled and Kawaguchi poked him in the chest.

“You will not.”

Outside, the storm was finally dying down. The thunder and lightning had stopped, and rain sounded steady but lighter. Kawaguchi gave another little shiver and Tenzou squeezed him closer reflexively.

“Get some sleep,” he murmured. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

“Promise you won’t let any more monsters get me in my sleep?” Kawaguchi said. He yawned and settled himself more comfortably into Tenzou’s side, as relaxed as though he belonged there.

Tenzou was relaxing too. He doubted he’d sleep much, but that was fine. One of them needed to keep the fire burning and stay alert for any danger the night might throw their way. He tucked the blanket more snugly around Kawaguchi’s shoulders, and Kawaguchi made a soft, contented sound.

“I promise,” Tenzou said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I started writing these fics, I told myself that since I'd be filling a prompt every day I'd try and keep each fic at less than a thousand words. Not only have I failed that every single day so far, but they're getting longer. Last chapter was 2k, this chapter is a whopping 3.7k. Someone save me from myself


	9. Trouble in paradise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team Phoenix is sent to a beautiful coastal town but for some reason Kawaguchi doesn't seem happy to be there

One of Tenzou’s favourite things about being ANBU was that he got to travel. Konoha could feel suffocating sometimes, and he looked forward to the missions that took them far out of the village, to new places he had never seen before and might never see again. Sometimes his destinations turned out to be disappointments, and sometimes they were dangerous, but every now and then he’d strike gold with a mission and find himself in a beautiful location.

This mission fell neatly into that category. The town they’d been sent to was on the southern coast where the sea sparkled blue under the summer sky and the sand was golden, the beaches fringed with palm trees. It was a plain clothes mission – even infiltration missions were acceptable at the beach – so he didn’t have to suffer the heat in his ANBU armour. He could walk around in shorts, feeling for all the world like he was on a working holiday.

Miho was similarly enjoying herself, letting them take some leisure time to explore the town. She and Tenzou had gone for early morning swims in the sea every day and Kawaguchi had finally been allowed the lie-ins he’d always been denied before. Yet Tenzou had also noticed that Kawaguchi had been unusually quiet ever since they’d received the mission scroll, and he’d become even more withdrawn since they’d arrived in town.

He’d disappeared that evening after dinner, and Tenzou had left Miho updating their daily mission log in their rented apartment and had gone to track him down. Eventually, he’d spotted a familiar figure sitting on the beach, which was close to empty now the sun was almost kissing the horizon.

Kawaguchi didn’t look up when Tenzou sat down next to him. He was staring out at the ocean and frowning slightly, sifting sand through his fingers in an absent-minded way.

“Something on your mind?” Tenzou asked.

Kawaguchi hummed noncommittally. A breeze was blowing in off the sea and it ruffled his hair against his forehead.

“You know you can tell me if something’s bothering you,” Tenzou tried again.

“Yeah, I know.” There was another silence, and Tenzou was about to concede that it was none of his business when Kawaguchi said suddenly, “I’ve been here before.”

“To this town? You never mentioned it.”

“Because I’m not allowed to.”

“Oh.” Tenzou understood the silences now. “You were here when you worked for Espionage.”

Kawaguchi nodded. He stopped playing with the sand and hunched forwards, rubbing the grit between his fingers. “I came here when I’d just turned fifteen and stayed for almost three years. When I left, I thought they’d never let me come back, so this mission was a surprise.”

‘They’ were presumably the shinobi who assigned missions at the highest level, including the hokage himself. Tenzou had known that Kawaguchi had spent his teen years working as a spy and that it had been a career choice forced on him rather than something he’d sought out, but this was the most Kawaguchi had ever told him about the missions themselves.

“Is it OK for you to be here?” Tenzou asked. “Aren’t you worried someone might recognise you?”

“No one would recognise me,” Kawaguchi said. He sounded oddly sad. “When I lived here, I was a girl.”

Tenzou blinked at him. “For…for three years?”

“Uh huh.”

“I thought you weren’t allowed to do missions longer than a month in the same henge.”

Kawaguchi winced. “Yeah, that was a rule implemented after my psych evaluation when I got back from this mission.”

Oh. Tenzou got the impression he had stumbled onto something much darker than he’d expected to find.

“I know you’re not meant to talk about this stuff,” he said, “but if you want to tell me, you know I’ll never breathe a word of it to anyone.”

“Yeah, I know.” Kawaguchi tapped a finger against his thigh as though considering, and then he glanced around them. There was no one else nearby. They had their own little quiet spot with only the gentle crashing of the waves for company.

“So, the mission was to get close to this specific shinobi family,” Kawaguchi said. “Two of us were sent here – me and an older agent who was pretending to be my dad. His job was to get close to the couple at the head of this family, and I was targeting their son. He’d just got old enough to learn the…special techniques this family is known for.” He glanced apologetically at Tenzou. “I’m not going to tell you any more about them than that. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but…”

“I get it,” Tenzou said. “I don’t need to know who they are.”

“Well, that’s why I was sent in as a girl. They thought a teenage boy might be more likely to show off to a pretty female friend. And they were right – he liked me a lot. The problem was…the problem was that I liked him a lot too.”

Tenzou had been keeping half an eye on the beach to make sure the odd dog walker or strolling couple didn’t get too close, but at that, the total focus on his attention snapped back to Kawaguchi.

“They didn’t ask you to…get closer to him?” He didn’t even like the way the innuendo felt in his mouth.

Kawaguchi shook his head. “No, it wasn’t like that. They didn’t even know. I didn’t tell anyone, not my mission partner, not my handler, and…fuck. I wish I’d had someone to talk to, but none of my friends knew who I really was. I’m sure questioning your sexuality is shitty anyway, but when you’re living as the wrong gender? Not fun. It really messed me up. I thought it was the henge, that it was changing me into someone I wasn’t.”

Tenzou couldn’t even imagine. He didn’t know what to say to that, but he didn’t get chance to think about it because Kawaguchi kept talking, faster now as though he wanted to push the words out of him and get rid of them.

“I started a relationship with that boy, in secret, and it killed me because I was using him. I was spying on him, and everything he told me about his family I fed back to Konoha like I was supposed to, but I also loved him. I really did.” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it dishevelled. “God, I still…ever since we got here I’ve been terrified of seeing him, but I also can’t stop looking for him.”

Tenzou felt like he’d swallowed a rock. “You’re still in love with him?”

“No.” Kawaguchi drew one knee up to his chest and leaned his cheek on it. “Not really. But he was my first love, and the person I was when I loved him just…doesn’t exist anymore. She never really existed in the first place. There’s no way to get closure from a situation like that.” He looked up at Tenzou. “We were engaged.”

“You were _what_?”

“His dad found out we were seeing each other. And my mission partner had done a good job getting close to the family – my boyfriend’s dad thought it would be a great match to marry our families together. So he went to my fake dad to propose an arranged marriage, I guess, and it wasn’t like we could say no without offending him and undoing all the work we’d spent three years on. So then of course Konoha found out that I was compromised and I’d fucked up the whole mission, basically.”

Tenzou was still stuck on the engagement. “Wait, wait. Did you…was that something you wanted? To marry him?”

Kawaguchi wrinkled his nose. “I was seventeen, Tenzou. I was as in love as a stupid teenager can be, but I wasn’t ready to get married. Though later on my handler – Haruki – told me that there were talks about making me go through with it. Having an agent in deep cover married into that family would have been advantageous in a lot of ways.”

Tenzou wrapped an arm around Kawaguchi’s shoulders, pulling him close as though to shield him from whichever bastards ran the espionage division. “They can fuck off,” he said vehemently, and Kawaguchi laughed.

“Yeah, that’s what Haruki told them. He got me out of there as fast as he could arrange it. And looking back on it, I know that was a good thing, but at the time…well, I was being taken away from all my friends, from my boyfriend, from this whole life I’d been living. And then I was back in my own body for the first time since I was twelve. It was bizarre. I didn’t recognise myself. I’d gone through puberty, obviously, but I hadn’t witnessed any of it, so overnight I went from being a girl to being this boy who looked different and sounded different to my last memory of myself. And I remember crying and crying because I just wanted to go home – I thought _this_ was home – and I wanted to be a girl again and I didn’t know who the fuck I was and I couldn’t tell anyone _any_ of this.”

His voice cracked on the last sentence and Tenzou held him so tightly that their bodies dug into each other at the awkward angle, but he didn’t care and Kawaguchi didn’t seem to care either. He let out a long shaky breath and turned his face into Tenzou’s neck.

“I’m sorry, that was really heavy.”

“Don’t apologise,” Tenzou said fiercely. “They should apologise to you. What the hell were they thinking, sending you on missions like that when you were still just a kid?” He tried to push that anger aside for now, though if he ever found out who’d made the decision to use teenagers as spies then he’d happily resort to violence. “More importantly, you know you didn’t do anything wrong, right? You dealt as best you could with a situation you should never have been put in.”

“I still fucked up though,” Kawaguchi mumbled. “I should never have got involved with that boy. It wasn’t fair to him. Everything he loved about me was a lie.”

“That isn’t true. I’m sure he wasn’t shallow enough to date you for all that time just because of how you looked. If anything, it proves that no matter what you look like, the person you are inside is intrinsically easy to love.”

Kawaguchi made a small muffled sound and clutched at Tenzou’s shirt. “Tenzou, don’t be nice to me right now or I’ll cry.”

Tenzou stroked his back, slowly and soothingly up and down. “If you do spot your ex in town while we’re here, let me know and I’ll kick his ass for breaking your heart.”

Kawaguchi laughed softly into Tenzou’s neck. “That’s very sweet of you. But I hope I don’t see him. I hate thinking about that part of my life. I’m so much happier where I am now, with you and Miho and normal missions.”

“Are you really OK with still using henges? Isn’t all of this infiltration stuff too close to what you used to do?”

Kawaguchi shook his head. “I like the henges. And I like infiltration, but I don’t want to do long-term missions anymore. That’s what fucked me up. It stripped away my identity and I forgot who I was.”

Tenzou leaned his cheek on top of Kawaguchi’s head. “If you ever find yourself starting to forget in future, come to me and I’ll remind you. You don’t ever have to be alone again. Not while I’m here.”

“Thanks, Tenzou. For letting me talk to you about this and not thinking I’m really weird.” 

Tenzou almost said that he was no one to judge identity issues. Not when everything he’d built his own life around was a lie. His name, his age, where he’d come from, why he had the powers he did… But he wasn’t ready to talk about that yet. Closer than he’d ever been, but not quite ready.

“For you, any time,” he said.


	10. Chicken soup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tenzou is sick and Kawaguchi comes by to take care of him.

Tenzou woke to a mercifully cool, damp cloth on his forehead. The fever had bounced him between unbearable heat and teeth-chattering cold for the past two days, and he was currently in one of the hot phases. He kicked off the blanket without opening his eyes, though a moment later he cracked them open as he heard someone cross the room and open the window.

Kawaguchi came back over to the bed and perched on the edge of the mattress next to him. “Hey there,” he said softly. “How are you feeling?”

Tenzou blinked at him, struggling to remember why Kawaguchi was in his house. “Are you a fever dream or am I so sick that I forgot you coming over?”

“I figured you’d be sleeping so I let myself in earlier with your spare key.”

“I gave my spare key to Kakashi.”

“Yeah, but I bribed him into lending me it.”

Tenzou snorted. “How much is my privacy worth to Kakashi?”

“I promised to go see the new Icha Icha movie with him, so a cinema ticket and a bucket of popcorn.”

Tenzou winced. “That’s a big sacrifice on your part just to come over and catch whatever I have.”

Kawaguchi smiled and rested a hand on Tenzou’s head, gently stroking his hair.

“I wanted to look after you a little. I brought round a bunch of medicines and food and stuff, and I’ve cleaned up the house. If you need anything else, just let me know.”

That hand in his hair felt really good. Tenzou’s eyes half closed and he leaned into it.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

“Like I’d leave you all alone when you’re sick. You just need some love and care and you’ll be fine.” Kawaguchi’s hand moved down to his cheek. His palm was pleasantly cool against Tenzou’s burning skin. “You probably also need some food. It’s almost dinnertime.”

“Is it?” Time had ceased to exist in Tenzou’s feverish bubble. “I’m not really hungry.”

“You should still try and eat something.” Kawaguchi stood up, and Tenzou immediately missed the soothing presence of his hand. “I’ll go heat you up some soup. There’s water beside the bed – you should try and drink some of that too.”

Tenzou stared plaintively after him as he left. Once Kawaguchi had gone, he removed the now-warm cloth from his forehead, levered himself up on one arm and found that there was not only a full glass of water on the bedside table but also a packet of painkillers, a box of tissues and a fluffy toy cat that was one of the few things Tenzou had kept from childhood. It usually lived in his closet, and he couldn’t remember having told Kawaguchi about it, but either he must have mentioned it and forgotten or Kawaguchi had come across it while looking for something earlier. Tenzou picked it up, smiling and shaking his head. He should not find it comforting to have a toy at his bedside, yet it was a very sweet gesture.

He tucked the cat into the bed beside him and sat up, propping the pillows up against the headboard. From the kitchen he could hear Kawaguchi humming and moving around, and he had to tamp down on his instincts to go and help. Instead he drained the glass of water and tried not to doze off again.

When Kawaguchi returned, he brought a bowl of soup on a tray, which he laid carefully on Tenzou’s lap. It smelt really good and looked suspiciously homemade. Knowing that Kawaguchi possessed the kitchen skills of a small child who’d never seen a vegetable before, Tenzou was instantly wary.

“Did you…make this?” he asked, trying not to look as though he were running through excuses for why he couldn’t eat it.

Kawaguchi grinned. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t poison you with my cooking when you’re already sick. My mum made it.”

Tenzou stared at him. “You asked your mum to make chicken soup for me?”

“Yeah! She used to make it for me when I was a kid so I can vouch for its curative powers. She made a tonne of it so there’s more in the fridge.”

Tenzou was still trying to get over the fact that Kawaguchi, on learning he was sick, had gone to his parents’ house and cajoled his mother into making him soup. He’d met Kawaguchi’s mother a couple of times and he liked her but he couldn’t say he really knew her. Suddenly he felt a wave of gratitude and affection and also a strong, sharp sense of guilt, because Kawaguchi had gone to so much trouble for him and Tenzou was sure he didn’t deserve it. No one had ever gone to these lengths to take care of him when he’d been sick before.

To try and hide his emotions – and it must be the fever making him overly emotional – Tenzou ate a spoonful of soup. It was delicious, and that just made it worse.

“I’ll have to thank your mum sometime,” he said, staring down at the bowl.

“Tenzou? Is something wrong?” Kawaguchi sat beside him on the bed, first picking up the toy cat and placing it on his lap so he wouldn’t sit on it, and even that small gesture made Tenzou feel like he was taking something he wasn’t owed and couldn’t repay.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Tenzou said, still staring down at the soup. “I’m sorry you’ve had to waste your day looking after me.”

Kawaguchi wrapped an arm around him and gently nestled Tenzou against his side, careful not to jog the bowl of soup. He ran his fingers through Tenzou’s hair again.

“Oh Tenzou, honey, looking after you is never a waste of my time.”

“But you don’t have to be here,” Tenzou mumbled. “There must be somewhere else you’d rather be.”

“I’m here because I want to be,” Kawaguchi said gently. “Because I care about you and I want to make sure you’re OK.” He kissed Tenzou gently on the temple, and Tenzou wished he knew why Kawaguchi gave him affection so easily when he’d done nothing to earn it, when he was sick and gross and no fun to be around. “And you better get used to it,” Kawaguchi added, “because I’m not going anywhere until you’re well again.”

Tenzou turned his face into Kawaguchi’s neck. “You’ll get sick too,” he said, but it was a weak protest. He didn’t want Kawaguchi to leave. It was selfish, but he needed this.

“Well, when I get sick then you’ll just have to come and take care of me,” Kawaguchi said. “Deal?”

And Tenzou was relieved to be offered this: some way to pay Kawaguchi back, to show him that he cared too, although he might not say it as easily or show it so openly as Kawaguchi did.

“I make good chicken soup,” he said, and Kawaguchi kissed his hair again.

“I’ll look forward to trying it,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been sick this weekend so I didn't manage to write anything yesterday but I will catch up with the prompts! Hopefully. I also skipped forward a couple of prompts because I was naturally in the mood for some sick fic but I do intend to go back and fill days 10 and 11 as well.


	11. Them's the breaks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kawaguchi shows up at Tenzou's door drunk and broken-hearted, and Tenzou lets him in

It was almost midnight when Kawaguchi knocked on Tenzou’s door. Tenzou had been getting ready for bed and had to spit out a mouthful of toothpaste before hurrying to answer. Usually a knock that late meant he was being called out on urgent ANBU business, but when he opened the door he found Kawaguchi on the other side. He was wearing a pair of dark jeans and a fitted t-shirt, as close to dressing up as Kawaguchi ever got, and Tenzou caught a faint scent of smoke and alcohol, which meant he’d been at one of the local bars. He looked like he wasn’t sure he should be here, chewing on his lip and not meeting Tenzou’s eye.

“Are you OK?” Tenzou asked.

Kawaguchi shook his head. He looked upset, and he wasn’t quite standing straight. Tenzou suspected he’d been drinking heavily, which was not normal for Kawaguchi. Alarm bells clanged in the back of his head, and he took Kawaguchi by the arm and steered him inside. Kawaguchi stumbled and caught himself on the wall.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, Tenzou, I’m really drunk.”

“That’s OK,” Tenzou said gently. “Let’s sit you down and I’ll get you a glass of water.”

He managed to keep Kawaguchi upright all the way through to the lounge, where Kawaguchi half sat, half fell onto the couch. As Tenzou tried to go back out to the kitchen, Kawaguchi grabbed him by the wrist and tugged plaintively. It wasn’t worth arguing with a drunk person, so Tenzou gave in easily and sat down next to him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did something happen?”

“That fucking asshole,” Kawaguchi said, but he didn’t sound angry. He sounded on the edge of tears. “I can’t believe he’d say that. I _liked_ him and he…”

“Wait, wait.” Tenzou tried to unravel that and failed. “Which fucking asshole?”

“Kouichi.”

“Oh,” Tenzou said flatly. “That guy you’ve been seeing. What did he do?”

“He found out about the henge thing a couple of weeks ago and started hinting stuff. And I thought I could ignore it but then today he flat out _asked_ me.”

Tenzou was struggling to keep up again. “Asked you what?”

Kawaguchi waved a hand as if to encompass a whole range of requests. “To do…henge stuff. And not even the weird stuff like ‘could you look like that movie star?’ or ‘would you be my ex-girlfriend?’. I don’t even care about that, I tell those guys to fuck off, but it was stuff like…like wouldn’t it be better if I was a few inches taller? Or if my hair was darker. And ‘you know, you’d look really good if you worked out a bit more, but I guess you can cheat and just use a henge.’ That kind of stuff.”

As Kawaguchi spoke, Tenzou felt a hot, suffocating anger balloon in his chest, pressing against his ribcage. And with the anger came a shock because Kawaguchi was talking like this had happened before, like there were other guys out there who had looked at Kawaguchi and found him wanting, and Tenzou had had no idea.

“He said that to you?” he asked, too outraged to form a more intelligent question.

Kawaguchi had been staring down at his hands, clenched tightly together in his lap, and now he hunched his shoulders.

“I thought he actually liked me,” he said. “But I guess the whole time he was making do and wishing I was actually hot.”

“But you’re gorgeous!”

Kawaguchi’s head whipped up at that, staring at Tenzou with an astonishment that shocked Tenzou all over again. He hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that but it wasn’t like he hadn’t noticed. It was so hard _not_ to notice, in fact, that Tenzou had always assumed that it was a universally acknowledged truth that Kawaguchi was unfairly good looking. He had one of those faces that Tenzou would describe as pretty even on a man, complete with dimples in his cheeks when he smiled and those wide brown eyes that Tenzou could never say no to even though he’d been pretending hard for years that he could. It seemed impossible that Kawaguchi could _not know_ that he was beautiful. The idea that he could be improved upon was heresy.

Yet Kawaguchi was blinking at him like Tenzou had spoken a foreign language.

“I’m not…” he started, but Tenzou cut him off.

“You’re gorgeous,” he said again with more conviction. “There is absolutely no part of you that isn’t beautiful.” Kawaguchi flushed, and Tenzou wondered if that wasn’t the right word to use for a man, but fuck it, he had to chase away all the lies that fucking asshole had put in Kawaguchi’s head. He took Kawaguchi’s hand, leaning forwards earnestly. It was so important that he understood. “Kawaguchi, there is nothing you could do that would make you any more perfect than you already are, and anyone who doesn’t see that should go see a doctor because there’s clearly something wrong with them. Plus you’re smart and you’re funny and you’re dateable in every way, and any guy who wants to be with you should feel lucky that you’re giving him the time of day.”

Kawaguchi kissed him.

It was a needy, desperate kiss, with fingers curling in his shirt and warm lips pressing into his. Softer lips than Tenzou might have expected, somehow, from a man. Whatever Kawaguchi had been drinking tasted sweet, and maybe it was the sweetness or the softness or the sheer unexpected shock of it that made Tenzou kiss him back. It was like a button had been pressed that switched his brain offline, and only on the reboot did he comprehend that he was kissing his drunk, distraught and rebounding friend like some asshole.

Gently, he pressed his fingers to Kawaguchi’s jaw and untangled their mouths from each other. Kawaguchi pulled back an inch and looked at him with such fragile longing that Tenzou found it hard to breathe. Their faces were still very close together, and as Tenzou struggled for words he thought again, _God, he_ is _beautiful_ , and it suddenly seemed a much more complicated thought than it had been before the kiss.

And then Kawaguchi’s eyes widened and he jerked back. “Shit, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have…I’ll go.” He stood up so hastily he almost tripped, and Tenzou remembered again how drunk he was.

“Wait!” He shot up too and grabbed Kawaguchi by the arms, both to steady him and to keep him from fleeing.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” Kawaguchi said, trying to tug away. Tenzou held him fast. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…I’m sorry!” He wouldn’t meet Tenzou’s eye, turning his body away as much as he could while Tenzou still had hold of him.

“Hey, it’s OK. It’s OK.” This was so far out of the realm of Tenzou’s experience in so many ways. All he could do was draw Kawaguchi closer and make meaningless, soothing noises. Eventually, Kawaguchi stopped trying to pull away and dared a glance at him, and the eye contact alone made Tenzou’s stomach flip. He didn’t know what the hell to do or say but he had to figure something out because he was the sober one, and the one who was panicking least.

“Don’t run away,” he said. “You don’t have to go. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I _kissed_ you,” Kawaguchi said, and Tenzou was almost offended at how horrified he sounded.

“Was it that bad?” he asked, falling back on humour because he didn’t know how else to handle this. Kawaguchi looked wrong-footed but less mortified, so that had to be a good thing. “Kawaguchi, I would rather you come here and drunk kiss me than go and kiss your shitty ex.” That asshole _better_ be an ex. Kawaguchi didn’t correct him, but Tenzou made a mental note to check on this point when Kawaguchi was sober, just in case.

“You’re not mad at me?” Kawaguchi asked.

“Why would I be mad at you?” Kawaguchi didn’t answer but he still looked troubled, and he glanced towards the front door like he was planning to slip away as soon as Tenzou let him go. Tenzou didn’t plan to give him the chance. “Let’s go to bed,” he said, and Kawaguchi’s eyes snapped back to his. “Platonically,” he added awkwardly. “You can stay the night and you’ll feel better in the morning.”

“I should probably go home…”

“Kawaguchi, I’m not going to send you out into the night alone when you’re drunk.” Especially since he wasn’t totally convinced that Kawaguchi wouldn’t end up at another man’s door, one with less compunctions about taking advantage of him. “Stay here and I’ll look after you. OK?”

Kawaguchi bit his lip, and Tenzou found himself staring at his mouth, remembering again the heat of the kiss, and then he felt a wave of guilty panic, as though Kawaguchi had caught him staring and could divine his thoughts. He looked away.

“Are you sure you want me here?” Kawaguchi asked quietly.

“Of course I do.” It came out a little too quickly but he meant it. “You’re my friend. One of my best friends. It’ll take more than a kiss to make me kick you out.”

Kawaguchi didn’t smile. He nodded silently, and Tenzou almost pulled him into a hug but didn’t dare in case he somehow made it weird. Maybe Kawaguchi was drunk enough that by the morning he’d have forgotten all about it. Maybe they could pretend it never happened and Tenzou could forget. Maybe he’d never think about it again, because there was no reason why he should.

No reason for it to mean anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The word 'friendzone' hasn't made it into Tenzou's vocabulary. Neither has the term 'gay panic'.


	12. Achilles' heel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It had been three weeks since the night Kawaguchi had come over to his apartment drunk and kissed him, and not a day had gone by since without Tenzou trying to convince himself that he wasn’t still thinking about it.

For the first time in a long while, the mission went wrong. All their hard work cosying up to the powerful family they’d been sent to steal information from had been ruined with a single word that Tenzou had let slip at the wrong moment during the dinner party. It was a slip so basic, so utterly infantile, that if the ensuing fight hadn’t erupted so suddenly then he would have curled up and died from mortification. As it was, he was distracted by trying to stay alive.

He was outside on the patio, at least, so when the man who’d recognised deception in that fateful word lunged forwards to try and grab him by the throat, he had room to dodge and counterstrike. Through the lighted windows of the house he was vaguely aware of sharp movement and raised voices, and he hoped that Miho could deal with whatever chaos erupted indoors. He had enough to deal with between the two men in evening dress and the blonde woman, who Tenzou tried to keep in his peripheral vision as she ducked a blow. Kawaguchi.

The word that Tenzou had unthinkingly said was Kawaguchi’s name.

Tenzou grabbed his opponent’s wrist and yanked him forwards, then grabbed a fistful of his jacket and brought his nose down into Tenzou’s knee. A burst of blood speckled his shirt, and then he had the man on the ground, head smacking hard against the paving stone. He groaned and didn’t get up. Tenzou whirled around and saw Kawaguchi fall back from a blow only to catch herself on the ground, raise herself on her hands and spin a kick into her opponent’s side that must have had a lot of chakra behind it because he went crashing through the open doorway into the house.

Kawaguchi landed neatly back on her feet and righted herself, smoothing down the skirt of her dress.

“How the hell did you do that?” Tenzou asked.

“I’m a shinobi,” Kawaguchi said, sounding bemused that he’d had to ask.

“But you’re wearing six-inch heels!”

“And I wear them like a pro.”

She took a couple of steps towards the door, flicking her blonde tresses back over her shoulder, and, not for the first time tonight, Tenzou found himself staring at her. At the colour of her hair, so similar to Kawaguchi’s natural shade, the cut of her dress, the way she moved with the utmost comfort in that body. There was too much of Kawaguchi in this henge, that had to be why, when he’d glimpsed her past the other man’s shoulder, smiling and sipping from her wineglass, he had let her real name fall from his lips.

He was so busy trying to map where Kawaguchi ended and the henge began that he didn’t hear the second man rising behind him.

Two rapid blows to the kidneys sent him sprawling to the ground, swearing and scrambling to move, but the breath had been knocked from his lungs and he couldn’t move fast enough to dodge the kick aimed right at his face, could only throw up his arm and brace for impact.

There was a _shunk_ and a gasping groan, and Tenzou lowered his arm and looked up. The man was still standing over him, eyes wide, mouth hanging slack, and the heel of Kawaguchi’s stiletto buried in the side of his neck all the way to the base of the shoe. She tried to pull her foot out, swore as it apparently stuck, and gave his shoulder a push to dislodge him. He collapsed with a spray of blood and Tenzou stared at him dumbly as he pressed both hands to his neck, trying and failing to staunch the bleeding. Kawaguchi bent over him with a knife and finished the job with a clean slice.

“Are you OK?” she asked. She took a step towards Tenzou, but then winced and shifted her weight back onto the foot she hadn’t just used as a deadly weapon.

Tenzou’s lower back was still smarting but he forced himself up and hurried the few steps over to her, taking her arm to balance her. “I’m fine, but you don’t look too good.”

“No need to be rude,” Kawaguchi grumbled. “I’ll have you know that red is a great colour on me.” She looked up at him – even with the heels she was half a head shorter – and Tenzou saw on her face the exact moment when she remembered the kiss. Her eyes darted down to his lips, and he felt suddenly claustrophobic. His hand on her arm was too much contact, and he let her go. She looked away.

It had been three weeks since the night Kawaguchi had come over to his apartment drunk and kissed him, and not a day had gone by since without Tenzou trying to convince himself that he wasn’t still thinking about it.

Before either of them could break the awkward silence, Miho stepped out onto the patio.

“What went wrong?” she demanded. “I just had to take down five people and I’ve absolutely _ruined_ this dress, so this better be good.”

Tenzou felt the heat in his cheeks. He wasn’t sure if Kawaguchi had heard what he’d said and he wished he could think of a lie to cover his shame, but his mind was blank. He wet his lips, stared determinedly at a spot just past Miho’s right shoulder and opened his mouth to confess his fuck up.

“It was my fault,” Kawaguchi said. “That pervert felt me up and found the knife.”

Tenzou stiffened. He felt the flush spread down his neck into his chest, and he hadn’t thought he could feel a deeper sense of shame but – surprise! – he’d been wrong. If Kawaguchi was covering for him then it meant she’d heard what he’d said. It also meant that she knew exactly why he’d been distracted by her.

Could this night get any more mortifying?

Miho was apparently oblivious to his suffering because she only sighed irritably and glanced back at the house. “Well, that’s unfortunate but it can’t be helped. At least there aren’t too many people here. It should be easy enough to clean up. A tragic fire razed the whole house to the ground and killed everyone inside.”

“Can you grab my bag first?” Kawaguchi asked. “I left it inside.”

“It’s probably covered in blood, but I’ll try and find it. You two should move away from the house. Go wait in the garden while I light this place up and then we’ll get out of here.”

She waved them off towards the large, shadowy lawn and disappeared back inside. Tenzou stepped away from Kawaguchi, keeping his gaze low so he wouldn’t have to meet her eye.

“Let’s go then,” he muttered, and stepped off the patio onto the neatly trimmed grass.

Behind him, he heard the scrape of Kawaguchi’s heel on the stone and then “ow, ow, ow!” He turned back sharply and saw her balancing precariously on one leg, wobbling as she tried to reach down to her other foot – the one she’d recently used to murder a man. Her eyebrows were furrowed with pain.

“I think I twisted my ankle in that guy’s throat,” she said. “I can’t walk in these.”

She glanced up at him uncertainly. Three weeks ago, she wouldn’t have simply asked him for help, she’d have whined unashamedly until he’d given her a full foot massage. But now she simply looked at him as though she wasn’t sure he would help her.

That was unacceptable. They couldn’t continue this way.

Tenzou went back to her and wrapped an arm around her waist, ignoring the way she tensed at the sudden intimacy. “Can you walk like this? There’s a gazebo back there by the trees – if you can get that far then we can sit down.”

Kawaguchi leaned against him, a hand clutching his shoulder to better take the weight off her foot, but still yelped when she tried to take a step.

“I need to take these damn shoes off,” she said.

Behind them, there was a flickering light from the windows, and then the crackle of flames. Kawaguchi glanced nervously back at the house, and Tenzou realised suddenly how stupid this was. He wasn’t going to wait for the heat to shatter the glass because he was too embarrassed to move them away. Without giving himself chance to overthink it, he bent down and grabbed Kawaguchi behind the knees and lifted her into his arms. She sucked in a breath and clutched at his suit jacket, and he carried her out over the dark lawn in silence, trying to ignore the touch of her bare legs against his arm and the way she turned her head into his shoulder.

The morning after the kiss, he’s thought it would be OK. That it wouldn’t be awkward and they’d both just forget about it. And they’d been fine, more or less, for the first few days. Then they’d been sent on this mission and had to spend every waking moment with each other, and not only that but Kawaguchi had put on this beautiful henge and seeing her as a _her_ had changed things. Tenzou was sure that’s what it was. His guy friend drunk kissing him was something he could have shrugged off, but seeing her framed this way had added an element he hadn’t accounted for.

Of course, that was the problem. That was why he kept thinking about the kiss, why he couldn’t get past it – because he didn’t just think of Kawaguchi as a guy. He thought of her as a girl too. It wasn’t _Kawaguchi_ exactly that he was obsessing over, it was the pretty female faces she wore and the way she acted when she looked like this. He was getting confused by this part of her.

The fact that Kawaguchi had been himself when they’d kissed, that it was his real face Tenzou kept thinking about, was immaterial. 

When they reached the gazebo, Tenzou set Kawaguchi gently down on the wooden bench. It was some distance from the house, and not much light reached this far. It was the darkness that gave him the courage to kneel down before her and carefully undo the straps of her shoes. First the foot she could stand on, then the one that was splattered with blood. He was careful not to jolt her ankle or touch her roughly, and she didn’t speak as he slid the shoes off and set them on the ground.

When he looked up, she was watching him, though she turned away as soon as their eyes met.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I should be thanking you,” Tenzou said. “You didn’t have to lie to Miho for me. What I did was unbelievably stupid. I could have got us all killed.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Tenzou stared at her. “I said your name! You’ve trained me better than that, we’ve done so many of these missions and I _knew_ your code name but I still fucked up.”

“I’m the one who kissed you.”

Kawaguchi still wasn’t looking at him. There was a silence, and then Tenzou lifted Kawaguchi’s foot and examined her ankle as best he could in the darkness to give him something to focus on.

“We need to get over this,” he said. “I hate feeling on edge around you.”

“I hate it too.”

The skin was swelling around the joint, and Tenzou cast a mild painkiller jutsu and circled his hands around Kawaguchi’s ankle. The dull glow of his chakra cast a green tinge on her skin, and he let a finger rest very gently over her Achilles’ tendon. Her foot twitched towards his touch, the movement so small that he wasn’t sure if it had been intentional.

“Kawaguchi, you’re very important to me,” Tenzou said. “I hadn’t realised how comfortable I felt around you until that comfort went away, and I want it back.”

“I never meant to make you uncomfortable.” Kawaguchi sounded wretched, and Tenzou took one hand away from her ankle, found her hand and held it. The jutsu shone softly from the edges of his palm where her smaller hand didn’t smother the light.

“You didn’t make me uncomfortable,” he said firmly. “I made myself uncomfortable by overthinking things. And I promise you I’m going to stop doing that.”

He knew how, in theory. He simply had to separate the two halves of Kawaguchi, the female and the male. The female half existed only in these missions, it was a tool in Kawaguchi’s arsenal and Tenzou had convinced himself subconsciously that it was real. He clearly had some kind of a misplaced crush on the idea of a female Kawaguchi, and the fact that a kiss from male Kawaguchi had triggered it just went to show how thoroughly his wires were crossed. But now that he knew, he could uncross them.

Kawaguchi curled her fingers slowly around his hand, and now that he was looking for it, Tenzou felt his heart thump.

“You’re important to me too,” Kawaguchi said softly. “I’d do anything to make things right again between us.”

“Then let’s accept the kiss and move past it,” Tenzou said. “It happened and it was just one stupid moment that doesn’t change anything. OK?”

The darkness obscured Kawaguchi’s face, and Tenzou wished he could see her expression, but she nodded and squeezed his hand, and he relaxed. Everything was going to be fine. She’d never know about his idiot feelings and he’d squash them down and put everything back to how it had been before.

He wouldn’t let himself ruin what they had. He cared about Kawaguchi far too much to ever let that happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The real question is where Kawaguchi was keeping that knife and whether Tenzou dares find out.


	13. Like a mama bird

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Tenzou, the day I stop flirting with you is the day your heart stops beating.” He paused thoughtfully. “And honestly even then...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last two chapters followed on from each other, but this one doesn't because I wanted to write something more light-hearted! So imagine it takes place a little earlier in the timeline.

Tenzou’s shirt was stuck to him with blood, probably someone else’s. He could barely feel his fingers, the result of damage to his chakra pathways, though Kawaguchi had cast a painkiller jutsu on his arms after the fight so at least the burning ache had faded to a dull throb. He was alone in the bathroom at the safehouse while Kawaguchi saw to Miho in the other room, and he could hear their voices faintly through the wall.

He’d come in here to clean himself up but he was having difficulty making his fingers work. The blood had dried on his skin, sticking his shirt to his chest, and all he wanted was to take it off but when he tried to grip the hem, his fingers couldn’t catch hold of the fabric. He was still struggling when Kawaguchi knocked at the door, which Tenzou had left ajar, and let himself in.

“You OK?” Kawaguchi asked.

“Fine. Just need to get this stupid shirt off.”

Kawaguchi wrapped his hands around Tenzou’s, moving them gently aside. “Let me get that for you.” He started to peel the shirt up over Tenzou’s abdomen, his fingers brushing against Tenzou’s skin. “Is any of this blood yours?”

“No idea,” Tenzou said honestly.

“Well I’ll check you out just in case. And I’ll even look for injuries while I’m at it.”

Tenzou snorted, and then raised his arms so Kawaguchi could remove the shirt. Once it was free of his arms, Kawaguchi chucked it into the shower and looked down at Tenzou’s bare chest. There was a lot of blood smeared over the skin, and it was hard to tell if there were any cuts hidden beneath it.

“I wish I had a body that looked that good covered in gore,” Kawaguchi sighed.

“I guess I’m not horrifically injured if you’re still flirting with me.”

“Tenzou, the day I stop flirting with you is the day your heart stops beating.” He paused thoughtfully. “And honestly even then...”

“Remind me to change my will when we get home so I can ban you from giving my eulogy.”

“I bet you’d be a really hot corpse.”

“Has that line ever got you a date before?”

“Do funerals count?”

Tenzou should have felt bad for laughing, but he didn’t. He needed it. They’d seen a lot of death today.

Kawaguchi wet a washcloth at the sink, letting the water run until it was warm.

“Let me clean you up a little and then you should rest for a while.”

“I can do it.”

Kawaguchi raised an eyebrow but held the cloth out for him. Tenzou tried to pick it up but again his fingers didn’t have the strength to grip.

“Your chakra pathways are fried,” Kawaguchi said. “And guess where you damaged them.” He wriggled the fingers of his other hand. “You can’t do shit right now, Tenzou. If you could, I’d have told you to take a shower, but I figured you wouldn’t want me to help out with that.”

Kawaguchi seeing him shirtless was one thing, but naked was something else entirely. Tenzou didn’t blush easily, but the thought made his face feel warm. “Absolutely not.”

“That’s what I thought. So at least let me wipe that blood off you. It must feel really gross.”

“It does.” Tenzou sighed and gestured for Kawaguchi to go ahead.

Kawaguchi started rubbing the cloth in small circles on his chest, sharp eyes watching for any injuries that might reveal themselves. Tenzou had been cleaned this way before by nurses in the hospital and had never liked it. For one thing, nurses were surprising ungentle, but he also hated the helplessness of not being able to bathe himself and the intimacy of a stranger seeing his bare skin.

It was different with Kawaguchi because, of course, he wasn’t a stranger, and Tenzou wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse. He was, however, infinitely more gentle than the nurses, brushing the cloth over each new spot very lightly at first, and only if Tenzou didn’t wince at the contact did he apply more pressure. Whenever the cloth became cold or too saturated with blood, he rinsed it with more warm water. Tenzou found the tension draining out of him, soothed by the sensation.

“This is actually very relaxing,” Kawaguchi said after a few minutes of comfortable silence. “Like colouring in but in reverse.”

“The colouring in part wasn’t very relaxing.”

“No,” Kawaguchi said meditatively, moving the cloth down to Tenzou’s stomach. “Killing people is such a stressful job. Do you think the hokage would let us start an ANBU yoga retreat? Or go to meditation classes or something?”

“Maybe we could hire an on-call masseuse.”

“Oh, I can give a decent massage if you ever want one.”

“You’ve kept that skill quiet.”

“I’d have offered sooner but I’d hate for you to think I was hitting on you.”

Kawaguchi wrung the cloth out over the sink and cocked his head as he looked over Tenzou’s chest for any spots of blood he’d missed. He’d done a thorough job, and Tenzou felt much better without the layer of grime coating him.

“Thanks,” he said. “That wasn’t as embarrassing as I thought it would be.”

Kawaguchi flashed him a smile. “See, I can resist your charms when I need to. I’ll even make the great personal sacrifice of helping you into a clean shirt if you give me a moment. Go wait in the other room and I’ll clean up in here while you dry off.”

The bathroom was small, and Kawaguchi had to press himself against the sink while Tenzou edged past him. Before he quite made it, Kawaguchi grabbed his wrist.

“Wait, hold on, I missed a spot!”

Tenzou blinked as Kawaguchi cupped his jaw and pressed a thumb to his cheek, rubbing gently at a mark there. Their faces were very close together, though Kawaguchi was focused entirely on erasing the spot of blood. The pad of his thumb was warm and damp, and it was only there for a brief moment before Kawaguchi took it away and his face brightened.

“ _Now_ I’ve got it all.”

He looked up, pleased with himself, and only then seemed to realise how close they were. His eyes widened fractionally but he didn’t move away. Couldn’t, Tenzou realised, because of the sink at his back. Tenzou was the one who had to move.

Belatedly, he did, stepping past Kawaguchi and through the bathroom doorway, feeling suddenly the chill in the air that hadn’t bothered him in all the time Kawaguchi had been cleaning him. As he moved through to the other room, he glanced back over his shoulder and caught Kawaguchi standing in the bathroom doorway, watching him go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've fallen two days behind but I'm still determined to fill all the prompts! Will I catch up before the end of the month? I guess we'll find out...


	14. Lullaby and goodnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They found the lab and the rest of the children nine days after they’d found the girl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a continuation from chapter 3 - the one where Team Phoenix was investigating Orochimaru and Tenzou was reliving his own trauma. You can blame EternalSurvivor for this one, who left a lovely comment and made me want to write a follow up <3

They found the lab and the rest of the children nine days after they’d found the girl. The lab had been abandoned in a hurry, cupboards open and empty but the equipment mostly left behind. Tenzou didn’t know what any of it was or what it meant. There were no notebooks or logs, and the one computer had been smashed beyond saving. Whatever these children had died for was lost, had perhaps been all for nothing.

Tenzou hated himself a little for that thought. It occurred to him when he found the bodies – eight, or maybe nine, it was hard to tell – and he stood over them and found himself hoping that whatever secrets had been teased from their suffering were not in vain. That the devil had found satisfaction in his sins, because otherwise their deaths were empty gestures. Pointless, pitiful things.

And then came the anger, the searing, choking fury like lava rising in his lungs. At himself, for failing to catch the man responsible, and at the children, for being so stupid, so small and trusting, for being dead. He hated them for lying at his feet and judging him with their dead eyes.

Someone touched him on the shoulder and his whole arm flinched up as though he might hit them, and he was so blinded by the dead eyes of the children that he didn’t see which one of his teammates he shoved past in his haste to get out of that room. Didn’t remember how he got outside, only became aware slowly that he was sitting on a fallen tree and watching the tremor in his hands.

The rest of the afternoon was hazy. He didn’t do much, and Miho didn’t ask him to. She asked him if he was all right, and when he nodded she’d left him alone to sit outside. He didn’t ask her what she’d done with the bodies and she didn’t tell him. 

And then it was evening and he was exhausted as though he’d been working hard all day instead of sitting and shivering in the quiet of the woods. But he couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to sleep. He knew he’d see the children in his dreams, or worse see _him_. Kawaguchi tip-toed around him in their shared room until it was time to turn out the lights, and then Tenzou lay down on his twin bed and pretended to sleep.

Time passed treacle thick as he lay and listened to Kawaguchi’s breathing. He counted each breath to try and stop himself thinking. Tried to shrink his whole world to Kawaguchi’s presence in the dark behind him, alive and warm and breathing and untouched by the spectres of Tenzou’s childhood. He made each of Kawaguchi’s breaths a charm against evil spirits, and in the space between each one he imagined small, cold hands reaching out for him, but then the next breath came and made him safe and kept the ghosts at bay.

And then the next breath didn’t come. And the hands, he could feel the hands tugging at his shirt, his hair, dragging him down into the grave with them.

Tenzou jerked awake. He was sweating and breathing hard, and he tried to calm his pounding heart so he could hear Kawaguchi’s breaths again, but his pulse was ringing in his ears. And the terrible thought came to him, half dream, half waking terror, that he couldn’t hear Kawaguchi’s breaths because he was dead. And he dreamt or imagined Kawaguchi’s dead body on the floor of the lab, and then he found himself crossing the small room with three stumbling steps before he’d realised he’d left the bed.

Kawaguchi woke up as Tenzou sat on the mattress beside him.

“Tenzou?” He sat up, voice thick with sleep, the darkness obscuring his face.

Tenzou wrapped his arms around him. It was a clumsy hug, the angle all wrong, but every jab of Kawaguchi’s bones into his ribs made him feel alive. It was the most essential hug of his entire life, and he would not have let go if Kawaguchi had run him through with a blade, would have held him and bled to death rather than let go.

Kawaguchi wound his arms around Tenzou’s back and pressed his forehead against Tenzou’s cheek.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmured. “I’m right here. It’s all right.”

It wasn’t all right. But it was better.

They stayed like that for a long time. Tenzou’s pulse came down very slowly until it was almost normal. He counted Kawaguchi’s breaths again, which he could feel against his face. It wasn’t the most comfortable hug, but Kawaguchi didn’t try to pull away. He stroked Tenzou’s back and held him close and whispered soothing words. He didn’t ask what was wrong, and Tenzou didn’t say anything at all.

Eventually, Kawaguchi tried to move, and Tenzou’s arms tightened like a vice, crushing them together.

“It’s OK, I’m not going anywhere,” Kawaguchi said. “Lie down with me. You can sleep in my bed tonight.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” Tenzou said. His voice didn’t sound like his own.

Kawaguchi kissed him softly on the cheek. “Lie down with me anyway. It’s warmer under the covers.”

If it was cold then Tenzou hadn’t noticed. But he let Kawaguchi coax him down into the bed, guiding Tenzou’s head to rest on his shoulder. It was a tight squeeze, but if Tenzou curled around Kawaguchi’s body then they fit together comfortably. Tenzou wrapped an arm around Kawaguchi’s waist and hooked a leg around his leg, greedy for the contact. It was funny, he’d never needed this before, or thought he hadn’t. Kawaguchi had always been the one to seek him out or pull him close, and no one else had ever really tried. He’d had a couple of lovers, but neither of them had been ANBU and he hadn’t been able to share even that much of his life with them, never mind the deeper, more tender parts.

Maybe all this time he had needed someone to hold him and had simply never known what he was missing because he couldn’t miss something he’d never had.

Kawaguchi was stroking his hair again, like he’d done the night after they’d found the first girl, and it was just as soothing now as it had been then. Tenzou didn’t want to sleep, but he closed his eyes and moved his head down onto Kawaguchi’s chest so he could listen to his heartbeat.

“You haven’t asked me what’s wrong,” he said.

“Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t.” Kawaguchi’s voice was as gentle as his touch. “Tenzou, you can tell me anything, but you can also tell me nothing. You don’t owe me anything for this. Whenever you need me, you can come to me, and I won’t ask for anything in return.”

Tenzou thought about that for a little while. About all this affection offered freely. “What if I need too much?”

Kawaguchi held him tighter as though the question pained him. “Tenzou, there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. You could ask for the very blood from my veins and I would give it to you.”

Tenzou raised his head, hovering over Kawaguchi and looking down at him as best he could in the darkness. “Why?”

A hand brushed his cheek very softly. “Because I….” Kawaguchi hesitated, wet his lips with his tongue. “Because I care about you so very much. More than you’ll ever understand.”

He was right. Tenzou didn’t understand. He had no idea what he’d done to earn this, but he knew he could never give it up. There was no one else in the world he wanted this from, and he would take and take for as long as Kawaguchi would have him. And in return he would give and give, even if he didn’t know quite how. He only knew that he wanted to keep Kawaguchi safe from the whole world because that was what Kawaguchi deserved.

He leaned his face into Kawaguchi’s hand, let his lips brush Kawaguchi’s palm in a not-kiss as Kawaguchi’s thumb traced the arc of his cheekbone, and then he laid his head back down on Kawaguchi’s chest and closed his eyes. And as Kawaguchi stroked his hair, Tenzou counted the beats of his heart – a little faster now than they had been before – and felt so enveloped in warmth and love that he forgot to fear the nightmares and slipped into sleep.


	15. A for effort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kawaguchi snorted and rummaged in his pocket. “Our captain begs to differ.” He held out a crumpled memo scrawled in Miho’s spiky handwriting, which Tenzou took and read.
> 
> _For the love of God, teach Tenzou how to suck less at infiltration._

Tenzou had barely sat down at his desk when Kawaguchi dragged him right back up and led him to one of the meeting rooms without explanation. Once they were inside, he shut the door behind them and turned to Tenzou with an unusually business-like expression.

“The two of us are going to do some roleplay,” he said.

Tenzou blinked at him. “I don’t think our relationship has got to that stage.”

Kawaguchi snorted and rummaged in his pocket. “Our captain begs to differ.” He held out a crumpled memo scrawled in Miho’s spiky handwriting, which Tenzou took and read.

_For the love of God, teach Tenzou how to suck less at infiltration._

Tenzou winced and handed the memo back. “Harsh.”

“But fair,” Kawaguchi said, not without sympathy. “We were lucky that I could cover for you last time, but I won’t be able to hold your hand through every mission. Which is where the roleplay comes in.”

“Honestly – and I don’t say this lightly – I’d prefer the hand-holding.”

But Kawaguchi appeared to be in a rare mood of wanting to actually do some training. He pulled out one of the chairs from the meeting table and gestured for Tenzou to sit down, which Tenzou did with trepidation.

“Relax,” Kawaguchi said, resting his hands on Tenzou’s shoulders and forcibly pushing the tension out of them. “We’re just going to do a few practice runs of approaching a target and making first contact. There’s no mission brief, you’re not trying to find out anything in particular, the aim is simply to build a rapport and make a good first impression.”

“That’s the hardest part,” Tenzou groaned. “I hate small talk. I did not sign up to ANBU to make small talk with the enemy. I would literally rather get beaten half to death, taken prisoner, be _tortured_ and then be beaten half to death _again_ while making my escape.”

“Tenzou, I’m sensing some negativity here.”

“I would rather join a book club with Kakashi and suffer through all of his weird erotic romance novels and then watch all the film adaptations – and he _cries_ during the films and eats popcorn _while_ he cries – and then I’d rather have a long and detailed discussion of every single sex scene than make small talk.”

There was a brief silence.

“Which parts does he cry at?” Kawaguchi asked. “The sex? Is it that bad?”

“I think you may have missed my point.”

“Does he eat popcorn with the mask still on?”

“You know what,” Tenzou said. “Fine. Let’s get this over with. But just know that I hate this and I will probably never be good at it.”

Kawaguchi squeezed his shoulders. “That’s the spirit!” He perched on the table, totally unperturbed by Tenzou’s lack of enthusiasm. “OK, to start with, you can play the target and I’ll make the approach, and then we can talk about what I’m doing and what kind of techniques there are. Then you can try. Sound good?”

Tenzou pulled a face, which apparently passed for yes in whatever optimistic world Kawaguchi inhabited because he carried on.

“We’ll start with a nice simple set-up. You’re in a bar, sitting alone at the counter and sipping your drink, maybe waiting for someone, and I sit down on the barstool next to yours and start up a conversation.”

On cue, he slid off the table and sat on the chair next to Tenzou’s, flashing him a bright smile.

“So I don’t usually do this,” Kawaguchi said, sliding effortlessly into character, “but my friend is running late and I thought that instead of sitting by myself maybe I could chat to the cute guy at the bar while I wait.”

Tenzou should have expected that. He’d seen Kawaguchi work, knew he was good at flattering and charming and sweet-talking, yet it still took him aback. No one flirted with Tenzou this unabashedly – except, ironically, Kawaguchi, but usually he was joking. Tenzou couldn’t imagine Kawaguchi actually wanting to pick him up in a bar.

“I, uh…hi?” he offered lamely, tripping over the first hurdle.

Kawaguchi’s smile softened a little but didn’t fade. “I guess you don’t usually do this either, huh?”

“Not exactly.”

“Phew! Then you won’t have high expectations and we can stumble through some awkward small talk together.” There was a knowing glint in Kawaguchi’s eye as he broke the fourth wall just a little, and somehow, strangely, it made Tenzou feel more relaxed. “So I hope it isn’t rude of me to ask, but I notice you’re alone. Are you waiting for someone too?”

“Uh.” Kawaguchi hadn’t given him a script, so Tenzou decided to make it up as he went along. “Yes.” And then, just to see what Kawaguchi would do, he added, “My girlfriend.”

Kawaguchi gave an embarrassed little wince, and the smile took on a self-deprecating note. Tenzou wished he knew how Kawaguchi did that, how he had such control over his expression that he could create all those nuances of emotion.

“Figures,” Kawaguchi said. “I always embarrass myself when I try to talk to strangers. I haven’t offended you so horribly that you want me to leave, have I?”

“No, of course not,” Tenzou insisted. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. You can stay and talk to me until your friend gets here.”

Kawaguchi’s face lit up, but this time – and Tenzou wasn’t sure how he could tell, but he could – he was dropping the role and the smile was completely genuine.

“Four whole sentences! Wow, Tenzou, look at you go.”

Tenzou felt his cheeks heat. “Were you shocked out of character?”

“Yes, pleasantly so. You didn’t do so badly, actually.” Tenzou scoffed, but Kawaguchi was serious. “You were a little awkward and monosyllabic, sure, but when you told me you had a girlfriend, that was really good. You took control of the conversation, offered a piece of information you knew would provoke a reaction. You were scoping me out, seeing what I’d do – and that is exactly the kind of technique I use in conversation when I’m figuring out a new target. Very nice.”

Tenzou blinked. “Wait, really? That was good?”

Kawaguchi nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, it was great. I wasn’t expecting anything that bold from you so early on. You have more confidence than you think you do.”

The praise was wholly unexpected, and Tenzou looked down at the table, feeling a shy little glow in his chest. Even if the rest had been excruciating, he’d done one thing right. That was one more than he’d expected.

“But I was really crappy apart from that,” he said. “I don’t know how to talk to people. How do you know exactly what to say?”

“I watch the other person carefully and react to them,” Kawaguchi said. “I came in with a bold opening, and when you looked intimidated by it, I softened my approach. You seemed socially awkward so I made myself more socially awkward as well so you’d feel like we were on an equal footing. You felt more comfortable after I toned it down, right? And then you helpfully gave me an opening to make myself _more_ awkward than you. And you could clearly empathise because you rushed to make me feel better. Which was very sweet, by the way.”

Now that Kawaguchi dissected the conversation, Tenzou could see it, but in the moment he hadn’t had a clue.

“How do you have the time to think through all this stuff as you’re talking?” he asked.

“I don’t,” Kawaguchi said. “Once you’ve done this enough, it comes naturally. You learn how to read people and how to react to them. You know, I rarely get it right first time. Just like right now, I came in with the wrong approach and had to change my tactic. I don’t expect you to be a mind-reader, Tenzou, and I don’t expect you to be perfect. I’m going to teach you how to be changeable. How to rescue a conversation when you get it wrong, because you will – and that’s fine.”

“I think you have too much faith in me.”

Kawaguchi waved a hand, dismissing Tenzou’s concern. “How many times have you accidentally said the wrong thing to a friend and upset them?”

“God, too many to count,” Tenzou muttered.

“And how many times has that led to an irreparable breakdown of a friendship?”

Tenzou paused. “Never.”

Kawaguchi leaned towards him. “Exactly. You already have this skill, Tenzou. You already know how to recognise when you’ve got something wrong and make it right. I’m just going to teach you how to use that skill with strangers as well as friends. That’s all.”

When he put it like that, it sounded a lot less scary. It sounded doable, even.

“We can practice a lot before our next mission, right?” Tenzou asked.

“We can practice a little bit every day,” Kawaguchi said. “And I can carry on demonstrating the approach to you a few more times before you try it yourself, if that would make you feel more confident.”

Tenzou was glad that Kawaguchi had been the one to suggest it. He’d dreaded playing the opposite role and would gladly put it off for as long as possible.

“I’d prefer that.”

“OK, we’ll do a few more rounds like this.” Kawaguchi tapped a finger on the table, looking thoughtful. “And we could try it in a few different locations, to mix things up. Ooh, I could test out some new henges, see how you do when an unfamiliar face approaches you.” He glanced at Tenzou, sizing him up. “You’d do better with a woman, of course. That way if you don’t talk much you’ve still got the strong and silent thing going for you. Whereas to a man you might come across as intimidating.”

Tenzou frowned. “Intimidating?”

“Tenzou, there are two ways people react to biceps that ripped,” Kawaguchi said, gesturing to Tenzou’s arms. “Men will feel jealous of you, women will want to date you. I’m generalising along the gender lines, of course. Personally, I would date your biceps in a heartbeat.”

“Just my biceps?”

“Well, if we’re going to play ‘fuck, marry, kill’ with your muscle groups, then…”

Tenzou held up a hand. “I don’t think I need to know.”

“Your abs would kill _me_ ,” Kawaguchi sighed. “And I would let them.”

“That would be difficult to explain to Miho.”

“At least you wouldn’t have to suffer any more infiltration missions.”

Tenzou snorted. “Well in that case let me take my shirt off.”

Kawaguchi leaned an elbow on the back of his chair and fanned himself. “The thought alone makes me feel faint.” He rested his head on his arm and his smile softened from amused to fond. “Flirting aside, you know you’re going to be fine, right? You can do this and I’m going to help you do it well.”

Tenzou still doubted that, but he appreciated Kawaguchi’s belief in him more than he could say. He felt a little less useless and a little less alone. “I thought you weren’t going to hold my hand.”

“I won’t always be able to on a mission, but while we’re training you up, I will metaphorically hold your hand all the way,” Kawaguchi promised. “And also literally if you like.”

“Thanks.” On impulse, Tenzou reached out and took Kawaguchi’s hand. It was the same impulse that had made him say he’d had a girlfriend in the roleplay: that urge to see what Kawaguchi would do.

Kawaguchi reacted as though it were the most natural thing in the world. He gave Tenzou’s hand a little squeeze and didn’t let go.

Tenzou didn’t let go either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can thank impoeia for this one, who wanted to see Kawaguchi giving Tenzou spy lessons <3


	16. A long soak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The third instalment in the saga of The Kiss: hot springs and jealousy edition

“You can’t pass through the Land of Hot Water,” Kakashi said firmly, “without visiting the hot springs. I simply will not allow it.”

Tenzou pulled his jacket more closely around his shoulders. The mission that had brought them to Yugakure had been an ANBU assignment but the weather was simply too cold for the ANBU uniform, and they were travelling back in plain clothes. Above them, the sky was steely grey and threatened snow, and Tenzou glanced up at it uneasily.

“If the weather turns, we could get snowed in,” he warned.

“Oh no, getting snowed in at an onsen resort, how awful,” Kakashi said. He turned to the third member of their team. “Kawaguchi, you have the tie-breaker vote.”

Kawaguchi hesitated, which was uncharacteristic of him. A couple of months ago, he’d have been enthusiastically on Kakashi’s side. But then, a couple of months ago he and Tenzou hadn’t kissed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tenzou has a point about the weather…”

“OK, screw the tie-breaker. As your captain, I’m _ordering_ you to come with me to the onsen.”

Tenzou snorted. “You’re not our real captain.”

“I’m your stand-in captain while Miho’s arm is healing and last I checked she’s still in a cast.”

“The mission is already over. Let’s just go home.”

Kakashi pouted. Tenzou couldn’t see his mouth through the mask but he could sense it. Then he glanced at Kawaguchi, who was staring towards the onsen building longingly but showed no signs of speaking up.

“Fine,” Kakashi said. “Plan B.” He slung an arm around Kawaguchi’s shoulders and started marching him towards the onsen. “I’m kidnapping your teammate and if you want him back you have to come and take off all your clothes.”

“Hey!” Kawaguchi wriggled a little, but Kakashi had him clamped firmly to his side and there was no escape.

“And if you don’t save him,” Kakashi called back, “I guess we’ll just have to get naked alone together. Two gay guys at an onsen…anything could happen.”

Kawaguchi smacked him in the chest. “Stop making this weird!”

“Oh it’ll get _much_ weirder before I’m through with you, darling.”

Tenzou frowned after them. Did Kakashi…? No, he couldn’t _know_. Tenzou hadn’t told him about the kiss and he doubted Kawaguchi would have. And there wasn’t any other reason he might suspect there was something between them. Which left the worrying possibility that the flirting was sincere, if terrible. Tenzou felt a sudden pang of…not worry, he wasn’t _worried_ about Kawaguchi dating other guys, that was ridiculous, but…he definitely shouldn’t date Kakashi. With that thought, Tenzou grudgingly followed them towards the building, certain he was going to regret this but afraid that if he left, he’d regret it much more.

The inn itself was a traditional wooden building with tatami mats on the floors and sliding paper doors leading between rooms. They were given a family room to share, provided with a towel and yukata each, and told they could enjoy the hot springs and order dinner whenever they liked.

“We don’t have many guests at the moment,” the girl behind the counter said brightly, “so you might get the pool all to yourselves!”

Great, Tenzou thought, and avoided looking at Kawaguchi, who apparently wasn’t looking at him either because he spoke to Kakashi as they dawdled in the foyer, deciding what to do.

“Let’s go out and bathe now before it starts snowing.”

“But it’s more romantic in the snow,” Kakashi said, and when Tenzou looked over, frowning, he was alarmed to see a tinge of pink on Kawaguchi’s cheeks.

“Well, I’m going for a soak,” Kawaguchi said. “You can either join me or not. Your choice.”

“Wouldn’t miss it. You go ahead – I’ll put our stuff in the room and then come down.”

Kawaguchi handed over his pack without an argument, and then Kakashi turned to Tenzou and held a hand out for his bag as well.

“I’ll come up with you,” Tenzou said.

Kakashi wiggled his hand. “Don’t spit in the face of my generosity, Tenzou. Let your senpai handle this.” A thought seemed to occur to him. “Or, alternatively, _you_ can take all our stuff upstairs and _I’ll_ go with Kawaguchi…”

Tenzou thrust his pack against Kakashi’s chest. “Just take it and go.”

Kakashi went – hastily, as though he thought Tenzou might change his mind – and suddenly Tenzou was alone with Kawaguchi.

For the first time since entering the building, their gazes locked, and there was an awkward pause before either of them spoke. Then Kawaguchi gestured to the doorway marked Onsen.

“Let’s go.”

They walked in silence through to the changing room: a large open space for communal undressing with a row of lockers along one wall and several showers in the adjoining room. There was no one else there.

Kawaguchi was studiously avoiding Tenzou’s gaze again. He closed his eyes briefly, sighed so softly that Tenzou would have missed it if the room hadn’t been so silent, and then crossed to the wooden bench by the lockers and unwound his scarf, letting it pool messily on the bench before shrugging off his coat.

Tenzou was still trapped in the doorway by some spell, unable to step through and start undressing and equally unable to look away. He didn’t understand why he felt so nervous. They had communal changing rooms and showers at the ANBU offices, and while he didn’t exactly like stripping down in public, he did it when he needed to. It wasn’t the first time he’d been to an onsen either. So why was his nerve failing him now?

He couldn’t pretend even to himself. He knew why. It was the kiss, which Tenzou was still thinking about even though it had been so long that the exact sensation of Kawaguchi’s lips against his own had been lost over time. But he remembered sharply the adrenaline tang of his own response, the shock of the first dizzy fall over the edge of the rollercoaster’s drop, and that he had kissed back and had liked it.

And he also remembered Kawaguchi’s expression when they’d parted, like he wanted to claw back the last few seconds from time itself and undo the whole thing. Tenzou wished he could have that same level of regret but he didn’t. He simply couldn’t wish that it hadn’t happened, and he had tried. God, he had tried.

He’d figured it out though – why his stomach fizzed not unpleasantly every time Kawaguchi looked at him or touched him or, God forbid, smiled at him. It was because of the henges. Because Tenzou had got confused over the pretty women Kawaguchi sometimes was and was projecting that attraction onto Kawaguchi himself. It made sense, albeit it was really weird, and if Tenzou ignored it for long enough, it would go away.

But this did not explain why he was panicking over Kawaguchi – a very male Kawaguchi – taking off his shirt.

“Are you going to just stand there and watch me?” Kawaguchi asked, and Tenzou felt himself flush at being caught staring – not that he’d exactly been subtle.

“I’m – uh – bathroom,” he said, and then fled through the door into the toilet before he could embarrass himself further.

As he was hiding in the bathroom, listening to the faint hiss of the shower from the changing room, Tenzou considered that maybe it wasn’t his not-crush on Kawaguchi that was making him uncomfortable. Maybe it was the knowledge that Kawaguchi was clearly also thinking about the kiss. Was he afraid of Kawaguchi seeing him naked? Was he homophobic? Tenzou frowned. Great, now he had to simultaneously worry about not-crushing on his male friend _and_ about his possible homophobia. This was getting more complicated by the day.

Only when the sound of the shower had ceased did Tenzou dare leave the bathroom. He left it an extra couple of minutes, and when he poked his head out the door he was relieved to find that Kawaguchi had gone outside without him. Tenzou had hoped that Kakashi would had arrived by now, but there was no sign of him either. Unless he’d come in and Tenzou had been too busy being homophobic to hear him?

Tenzou stood in the middle of the room, dithering. Should he suck it up and follow Kawaguchi out or should he wait for Kakashi? The light outside was growing dim as evening approached, and Tenzou thought suddenly of Kawaguchi outside alone, abandoned because Kakashi had got distracted and Tenzou was being a prick and very obviously avoiding him. He winced, feeling guilty suddenly. He’d even said to Kawaguchi on their last mission that he wanted to dispel the awkwardness between them, and he had failed utterly at the first hurdle. If neither of them bridged the gulf that had opened between them, they might never be able to repair their friendship. Tenzou didn’t want that. Forget the crush or not-crush or whatever – Kawaguchi was very important to him, and he would do anything not to lose him.

So Tenzou undressed and hurriedly showered, and then wrapped his towel around his waist before walking out into the evening air.

It was cold outside, bringing him out in goosebumps as soon as his bare feet touched the flat stones that surrounded the pool. The air was thick with steam and very dim, lit by lamps around the perimeter. One side was fenced, presumably separating the male and female pools, but the other two sides were lined with evergreen trees, and Tenzou could smell fresh pine needles.

At first, he couldn’t see Kawaguchi among the steam, and then he picked out a shape on the far side of the pool, his back to Tenzou, his head laid on the rocks in a cradle of his arms. Tenzou wasn’t sure if he looked peaceful or lonely.

Kawaguchi didn’t turn as Tenzou ditched his towel and lowered himself into the hot spring. It was gloriously warm, and his skin tingled as he moved from the cold air to the hot water, painful for the first moment until his body adjusted. The water came up over his waist and rose up to his chest as he made his way slowly over to Kawaguchi, who must have heard him but didn’t react in any way to Tenzou’s presence.

When Tenzou came up beside him, Kawaguchi glanced up at him from under his lashes but didn’t raise his head.

“I didn’t think you were actually going to come out here,” he muttered.

The closest lamp wasn’t close enough to shed much light on them, and the twilight was gloomy. Tenzou bent his knees to lower more of his body into the water, leaning a shoulder against the stone wall of the pool.

“Where else would I go?” he asked.

“Somewhere I’m not.”

Somehow, consumed by his own thoughts, it hadn’t occurred to Tenzou that hiding in the bathroom was a very obvious snub. He’d been so wrapped up in himself that he hadn’t spared a thought to how he was making Kawaguchi feel.

“I’m sorry,” he stammered out. He meant to follow it up with an explanation, but none came. He was still casting around for some excuse when Kawaguchi lifted his head and regarded him with an expression that made Tenzou feel impossibly small.

“I get it,” he said flatly. “I’m gay and I kissed you and now you feel uncomfortable around me. But guess what, Tenzou – I’m not actually some pervert who’s going to stare at your junk in the hot springs.”

“I didn’t think you were!”

Kawaguchi’s gaze was withering. And beneath the flat, hard anger, there was hurt. A lot of hurt.

“Sure, Tenzou. Whatever. Maybe you want to carry on pretending that everything is fine, but it isn’t and, honestly, I can’t do this anymore.”

In the midst of the hot water, Tenzou’s heart went cold.

“What do you mean?”

Kawaguchi ran a wet hand through his hair. And even now, in the midst of all this emotional turmoil, Tenzou couldn’t help noticing how beautiful he was. His face was flushed from the heat, his dark eyes catching a glimmer of lamplight, and Tenzou wanted to hold him close and smooth away the stress lines that furrowed his eyebrows. The knowledge that he was the cause of the stress made his chest ache.

“I think we should spend some time apart,” Kawaguchi said. “Stop hanging out. Just…get some space from each other.”

“No.” Tenzou took a step closer. “I don’t want that.”

“Well I do!” Kawaguchi was no longer making any attempts to hide how upset he was. It was written all over his face, and Tenzou felt sick to think he’d caused that pain. “Being around you is making me miserable, Tenzou. I hate the way you can’t look me in the eye, I hate how you avoid being alone with me, and I hate most of all that you can’t just admit it. You’re treating me like I’m some predator who might molest you at any minute.”

“It isn’t like that!” Tenzou’s own thoughts that he might be harbouring some mild homophobia were one thing, but Kawaguchi’s accusation was something else entirely. It was not true – it was the opposite of true! If anything, Tenzou had been worried that _he_ would give in to his stupid confused feelings and kiss Kawaguchi again. But how the fuck was he supposed to explain that?

“Then what is it like?” Kawaguchi asked. His voice was raw in a way that Tenzou had never heard before, and he realised with a shock that this was the first time they had really fought. “Tell me, Tenzou, because I have no clue what else could possibly be going through your mind right now.”

“I don’t know,” Tenzou said, and knew how utterly inadequate that was.

Kawaguchi let out a sound of disgust and turned away, but Tenzou grabbed him by the arm and tugged him back round with enough force that Kawaguchi stumbled and had to catch himself with a hand against Tenzou’s chest. Tenzou wrapped an arm around his back, forced him a step closer, and Kawaguchi’s eyes went wide. His arm went taut, his hand still splayed on Tenzou’s chest, now keeping a space between them, although Tenzou wasn’t trying to close it. He was conscious of their naked bodies only inches apart in the water, of course, his whole body felt electric at the possibility of touch, but he was only trying to stop Kawaguchi from running away.

“I mean it,” he said. “Kawaguchi, I really haven’t been thinking that way about you. And I don’t know why I can’t get over that kiss but it isn’t because I’m scared you’ll do it again.”

Kawaguchi was still trying to pull away, but he wasn’t putting much effort into it, and Tenzou easily kept him locked in place with one hand on his back and the other still holding his arm.

“Then what are you scared of?” Kawaguchi asked. “You’re scared of something. I see it every time you look at me.”

“I…” Tenzou moistened his lips. It would be so easy to kiss him again. So easy and so stupid because it couldn’t be what he really wanted – might not be what Kawaguchi wanted, Tenzou didn’t know. He just didn’t know. But he was sick of not saying it too. “I’m scared that _I’m_ the one who…”

A sound made them both turn towards the inn. The door to the changing rooms had swung open and Kakashi stepped outside – Tenzou could tell it was him even through the mist because he was still wearing that damned mask.

“You’re the one who what?” Kawaguchi asked, voice low and urgent, but it was too late. Tenzou let him go, locked eyes with him in one last mutually frustrated look, and then turned away as he heard Kakashi splashing through the water towards them.

“Sorry I’m late,” Kakashi chirped as he came up on Kawaguchi’s other side, either oblivious to the atmosphere or ignoring it. “The innkeeper had lost her cat so I decided to help her find it, and it gave us the run around half the neighbourhood.” He leaned back against the rocks with a contented sigh. “No snow yet?”

Kawaguchi leaned an elbow on the side and tapped Kakashi’s masked cheek. “You can’t wear that stupid thing out here. You’ll suffocate in all the steam and pass out.”

“Ahh, I’ll be fine. Gotta protect my dignity.”

“There’s no one else out here but us,” Kawaguchi said. He curled a finger around the top of Kakashi’s mask, and Tenzou’s skin crawled with a sudden, horrible suspicion. “Just take it off.”

Tenzou watched dry-mouthed as Kawaguchi pulled down Kakashi’s mask and Kakashi let him. Kawaguchi had his back to him so Tenzou couldn’t see his expression, but he didn’t comment at all on Kakashi’s face, didn’t give any sign that he’d never seen it before. And there were a hundred reasons why he might have seen Kakashi unmasked – a thousand legitimate reasons – but Tenzou couldn’t think of any but one.

What the _fuck_ had happened between his two best friends?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've completely abandoned writing the prompts in order at this stage. The next one will follow on from this, I just need to figure out which prompt it'll fit into.


	17. Winter wonderland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Wait,” Tenzou said again. He could feel his cheeks heating up. “What exactly has Kawaguchi told you?”
> 
> “Oh God, what _hasn’t_ he told me?” Kakashi sighed. “We’ve talked about you a _lot_. Which has been kind of awkward for me, honestly. Can you please stop taking your shirt off around him? I really don’t need to hear him wax poetic about your abs anymore. He won’t take the hint, even when I shove my fingers in my ears and sing really loudly.”

The snow started falling once they’d left the onsen the following morning. It wasn’t so heavy that they couldn’t keep walking, but it slowed them down, and it carried on steadily throughout the day. After a quick lunch, eaten on the move, they entered a forest and the canopy of trees sheltered them from most of the snow. A few flakes still floated down through the still air to land in Tenzou’s upturned coat collar and melt against his skin.

Beside him, Kawaguchi caught a snowflake on his tongue. He’d been quietly thoughtful for most of the day but Tenzou knew from winters past that he loved the snow. In a different year, they might have stopped for a snowball fight, but although the strained awkwardness of yesterday was no longer so tense, it hadn’t fully gone away either. They hadn’t found chance to resume their interrupted conversation, although Tenzou had been so desperate to apologise that once they’d gone to bed, side by side in their futons, he’d reached out and traced the word _sorry_ on Kawaguchi’s wrist. And Kawaguchi had hesitantly touched Tenzou’s hand, palm to palm, but when Tenzou had tried to entangle their fingers, Kawaguchi had pulled away. It hadn’t felt like a rejection; it had felt like uncertainty. And Tenzou could live with that for now.

“I was thinking we could make a slight detour,” Kakashi spoke up. He was inspecting the map as they walked. “There’s a village a little way to the east and we could use a few more supplies. For one thing, Tenzou could use a scarf.”

“I’m fine,” Tenzou insisted, trying not to shiver as more snowmelt trickled down his neck.

“Also I have a real craving for chocolate,” Kakashi sighed, ignoring him. “So, Kawaguchi, I think you should go and buy us a few things.”

Kawaguchi frowned. “Just me?”

“Yep, just you.”

Kakashi offered no further explanation, but Kawaguchi’s gaze flickered to Tenzou and back, and then he raised an eyebrow. A brief, wordless exchange passed between him and Kakashi, the meaning of which Tenzou couldn’t fathom. Evidently, the matter was settled in Kakashi’s favour, because Kawaguchi sighed and held out his hand for the map, which Kakashi passed him along with some money.

“I’ll be quick,” he said, and it sounded like a warning. “Don’t be too… _you_ …while I’m gone.”

“No promises,” Kakashi said cheerfully.

Kawaguchi glanced over at Tenzou again just as a snowflake landed right inside Tenzou’s collar. This time he couldn’t repress the shiver. Kawaguchi hesitated, and then he reached up and unwound his own scarf, walking right up to Tenzou – closer than he’d come all day – and looping it around Tenzou’s neck. It was soft, and warm from Kawaguchi’s skin, and when Kawaguchi’s fingers brushed against his throat, the skin tingled where they’d touched.

“Don’t freeze to death before I get back,” he said, and Tenzou wondered if this meant he’d been forgiven. He gazed after Kawaguchi as he set off in the direction of the village, and once he’d vanished amongst the trees, he turned to Kakashi.

“What was that about?”

“I wanted to talk to you. Alone.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?” Tenzou asked, raising an eyebrow of his own.

“I did. Kawaguchi got it, it’s not my fault you’re slow on the uptake.”

“How the hell could he possibly have got that? You were just pulling weird faces at each other!”

“He got it,” Kakashi said again with total confidence. “He knows exactly what I want to chat to you about.”

“How?”

“Because he’s not quite as stupid as you.” When Tenzou snorted, he added, “And because we’ve had variations on this conversation many, many times.”

Well now Tenzou was intrigued. “Spit it out then. What’s so important that it can’t wait until we’re back in the village?”

“I wanted to ask whether you and Kawaguchi have sorted things out.”

Tenzou felt suddenly hot and cold, like he was feverish. “What?”

“I figured getting naked together would be a good instigator for another kiss,” Kakashi said thoughtfully, “but then, I’m not exactly the world’s greatest expert on love or anything. And the vibe between you has definitely changed since yesterday but honestly I don’t know _what_ to make of it so I figured I’d just ask.”

“Wait,” Tenzou said, still trying to process all that. “Wait, wait, wait. You took us to the onsen to _set us up_?”

“You make it sound like I was setting you up to be assassinated. I was just trying to help speed things along since Kawaguchi didn’t take my advice and just _talk_ to you. On second thoughts, I retract my earlier statement that he’s smarter than you. You’re both idiots.”

“Wait,” Tenzou said again. He could feel his cheeks heating up. “What exactly has Kawaguchi told you?”

“Oh God, what _hasn’t_ he told me?” Kakashi sighed. “We’ve talked about you a _lot_. Which has been kind of awkward for me, honestly. Can you please stop taking your shirt off around him? I really don’t need to hear him wax poetic about your abs anymore. He won’t take the hint, even when I shove my fingers in my ears and sing really loudly.”

Tenzou was by now so hot that he had to loosen Kawaguchi’s scarf around his neck. “Are you saying that Kawaguchi…is interested in me? Romantically?”

Kakashi stopped screwing up his face at the memory of Kawaguchi’s odes to Tenzou’s abs. He stared at Tenzou in disbelief. “Tenzou…you’re not seriously asking me that, are you?” When Tenzou’s expression confirmed that he was, in fact, seriously asking, Kakashi flung up his hands. “Oh _come on_! He’s not exactly been subtle! He literally tells you to your face how hot he thinks you are. He snuggles up to you whenever he gets half a chance. He’s _all over you_ all the time!”

“Well, yeah, but…I didn’t think he was _serious_ ,” Tenzou protested weakly. “It’s not like he only flirts with me. He flirts with a lot of other guys. I’ve seen him flirt with _you_.”

Kakashi waved a dismissive hand. “Well obviously he’s just joking when he flirts with me.”

“ _How is that obvious_?”

“It just is,” Kakashi said, which was not helpful.

“And _you_ were flirting with _him_ yesterday,” Tenzou accused.

“I thought some healthy jealousy would inspire you to make a move before I did,” Kakashi said. “Not that I was going to. I would never try and steal your man, Tenzou. What kind of senpai would that make me?”

But Tenzou wasn’t about to let it go that easily. “You let him pull down your mask,” he said, and this time his voice was tight. “He’s seen your face before.”

“So have you,” Kakashi pointed out. “The mask isn’t stitched onto my face, I do take it off sometimes when I’m with people I feel comfortable with.”

“You’re telling me that nothing has ever happened between the two of you?”

There was a silence. Tenzou’s blood felt suddenly thick in his veins.

“In the interests of full disclosure, there was this one time,” Kakashi admitted. “We’d had a couple of beers and it occurred to us that, you know, he’s gay, I’m gay, what the hell, let’s make out and see what happens.” He wrinkled his nose. “It didn’t work out.”

“Didn’t work out,” Tenzou repeated flatly. He couldn’t imagine anyone kissing Kawaguchi and not wanting to do it again.

“I think we’d already friendzoned each other pretty thoroughly,” Kakashi said. “It was weird. Like if I kissed _you_. And no offense, Tenzou, you’re a good-looking guy, I mean I can see where Kawaguchi is coming from with the whole…” He gestured up and down Tenzou’s body to encompass where Kawaguchi’s admiration lay, and coming from Kakashi it was the most horrifying thing that had ever happened to Tenzou.

“Oh my God, don’t,” he said. “I don’t care if this is homophobic – you are _not_ allowed to check me out.”

“Aw, but Tenzou, we could have one of those cute senpai-kouhai romances where you slip love notes into my locker at work and swoon every time I notice you.”

“I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.”

“Anyway, the point is, Kawaguchi is not the cute guy I want to date, he’s the guy I talk to about the cute guy I want to date.”

Tenzou was still working hard to repress the memory of the last few minutes of conversation. “Right. OK. Good.”

“Now that we’ve got that out of the way,” Kakashi said, “tell me, what exactly happened at the onsen? Did you two finally kiss again?”

 _That_ jerked Tenzou back to the present. “No! Wait…what do you mean ‘again’?”

“I mean since the last time,” Kakashi said patiently. “He was the one who was drunk, you can’t pretend you’ve forgotten.”

Tenzou shut his eyes, mortified. “He told you about that?”

“I’m the guy he talks to about the cute guy he wants to date. Which is you, just in case you still hadn’t quite grasped that. I still can’t believe you _hadn’t realised_. What the fuck, Tenzou? Why aren’t the two of you an item yet? It’s pretty obvious that you have a thing for him too.”

“I do not,” Tenzou spluttered. “I mean…maybe I do but…it’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about it?”

God, where did Tenzou even begin? How did he even articulate the things that had been going round and round his head for the past couple of months?

“He’s a guy,” he settled on lamely. “I don’t like guys.”

Kakashi raised an eyebrow. “Unless you like him, in which case, congratulations, you do.”

“But I’ve never liked a guy before!”

“Well you’ve got to start somewhere. What, did you think the rest of us popped out of the womb and turned our noses up at sucking on tits because we wanted to suck on –”

“I swear to God, Kakashi, if you finish that sentence I will have to punch you just to shut you up.”

“The point is, there’s no age limit on figuring out your sexuality. I was seventeen-ish, I think? And it wasn’t like I suddenly turned gay – thinking back on it, I’d definitely had a couple of crushes, but I didn’t recognise them for what they were. It had never occurred to me that I might not be straight, even though I’d never been interested in dating a girl.”

This was the most Kakashi had ever said about his sexuality, and Tenzou was surprised at how comforting he found the idea that Kakashi had been confused too. He’d never thought to ask Kakashi about this before. Kakashi had come out to him, if that was the right term, by simply mentioning an ex-boyfriend in casual conversation, and then had immediately changed the subject. That had been a few years ago, and since then Kakashi had relaxed a lot – especially since the two of them had become friends with Kawaguchi, Tenzou realised now. Maybe Kakashi had needed this too. Someone to talk to who understood.

“How did you figure it out?” he asked.

Kakashi stared thoughtfully into the trees. “It was a combination of things,” he said. “I remember there was this guy who hit on me. And I wasn’t interested in him, but I’d never experienced that before. It had never occurred to me that a man might want to date me. I mean, I knew that queer people existed, obviously, but I’d never thought about them in relation to _me_. And then a couple of weeks later I met this other guy. Actually, he caught me in a trap.”

“I remember that,” Tenzou said. “The kid who built ANBU traps. He’s a teacher now, right?”

“Yeah,” Kakashi said, sounding fond. “He was so smug about it, and even though he was a little shit, that trap was actually very impressive. I started following him around, trying to talk to him, obsessing a little bit, honestly. And it hit me suddenly that I was crushing really hard. I couldn’t do anything about it since he only knows me as Hound, and I was a stupid teenager back then so I doubt I’d have had the courage anyway but…it all suddenly clicked. And it freaked me out a lot. My life was complicated enough without adding a sexuality crisis into the mix. But then I realised I was the one making it complicated. There’s nothing complicated about dating another guy except figuring out if they’re straight or not. And you already know that your love interest is as gay as they come and conveniently head over heels for you, so you have nothing to lose.”

“But what if I’m just confused?” Tenzou said. “Because sometimes he’s a woman. I’m around him so much in his henges, and he’s really cute as a girl. I just don’t want to start something and then realise I was wrong and ruin our friendship.”

Kakashi cocked his head to the side. “Has it occurred to you that you can like men and women? Just because you think he’s cute as a woman doesn’t mean you can’t _also_ like him as a guy.”

Tenzou had, in fact, not considered this at all. The possibility took him aback so much that he couldn’t speak for a moment. “Isn’t that…really weird? Not being bisexual, but being bisexual for one person.”

“Hey, if Kawaguchi’s into it then I’d say that makes you the luckiest bisexual on the face of the planet.”

Tenzou closed his eyes. “Don’t make this even weirder than it already is.”

Kakashi shrugged. “Kawaguchi’s gender is unconventional, sure. But so what? If you liked kissing him as a guy and you also think he has great tits –”

“ _Kakashi_!”

“– then what’s the problem? You _are_ attracted to him as a guy, right? You’re clearly hung up on that kiss.”

Tenzou had liked the kiss. Even he couldn’t deny that to himself after weeks of staring at Kawaguchi’s lips and remembering how soft they were.

“I think,” Kakashi said, “that you should kiss him again. Honestly, I still can’t believe that nothing happened at the onsen. You were both naked, for God’s sake, and I left you alone for so long!”

“That was the worst thing you could possibly have done! I freaked out and messed up and we had a fight! And, actually, I _was_ going to tell him that I wanted to kiss him, but then you turned up and interrupted us!”

“I never said I was _good_ at matchmaking,” Kakashi said.

Tenzou’s head was buzzing. Why hadn’t he spoken to Kakashi earlier? Or Miho or – or Kawaguchi? His thoughts felt clearer now that he’d said them out loud and had someone else pick them apart.

Kakashi was looking at his watch. “Kawaguchi should be back soon. Maybe wait until we’re back in Konoha before you say anything. I don’t want to third wheel on this love affair more than I already am.”

“Says the guy who took us to an onsen.”

“I still think that was a stroke of genius on my part. You two idiots are the ones who messed it up.”

Tenzou privately considered that all three of them were idiots, but he altruistically decided not to say so.

“Thanks,” he said instead. “I feel better now we’ve talked about it.”

“You know me, Tenzou, I love a good romance. Happy endings are obligatory.”

“I’ll try to get one. But senpai?”

“Hm?”

“If you hit on Kawaguchi again, I _will_ kick your ass.”

“That’s fair.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I absolutely crowbarred this fic into one of the prompts I had no other plans for. Hush. More importantly, could we be approaching...a confession?????
> 
> Also, regarding Kakashi's sexual awakening - this may sound familiar so let me clarify that this is compatible with the version in From the Dust where Kakashi mentions falling in love at first trip wire with Iruka. It's _not_ compatible with the Building Traps for Gods version, which features Iruka's ANBU traps in more detail. I often reuse the same ideas but in very different iterations and don't want anyone to get confused!


	18. Supernatural problems

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Kakashi and Tenzou's talk, Kawaguchi doesn't come back. They go looking for him, and find something terrible

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic follows on directly from the last one

Kawaguchi didn’t come back.

They waited for almost an hour, the sun getting lower in the sky as the afternoon wore on, and there was no sign of him. Tenzou checked his watch more and more often, and Kakashi frowned at the footprints Kawaguchi had left in the snow.

“It’s been too long,” Kakashi eventually said. “Even if something delayed him in the village, it’s only fifteen minutes away if he was moving quickly, and I’m willing to bet he didn’t want to leave us alone for too long.”

“Something must have happened,” Tenzou said, immediately flicking through the possible things that could have gone wrong. The Land of Hot Water was neutral in the political tussles between countries and was mostly peaceful, but like all countries with a hidden village, it had its missing nin. He’d heard of a cult that lived in this region too, although the rumours went that their headquarters were in the less populated lands in the north. Still, it was conceivable that there were dangerous people nearby.

“Let’s go,” Kakashi said, setting off through the trees at a rapid clip, following the trail Kawaguchi had left. Tenzou was hot on his heels, dread creeping up his spine.

It wasn’t long before they found the bodies.

When Tenzou first spotted the unmoving shapes on the ground up ahead, his heart stuttered in his chest and he shunshinned to their side, unable to bear even the few seconds it would otherwise have taken to reach them. On seeing that neither of them was Kawaguchi, he shut his eyes briefly and breathed in deeply, allowing himself that small relief before he took in the scene before him.

The dead couple were a man and a woman, both in their late thirties or early forties, both recently killed. There were still marks in the snow that showed the scuffle: they had evidently tried to run from some attacker but he had brought them down one at a time, first the man, who had died where he lay, and then the woman, who had got further before being dragged back through the snow. How they had died was not apparently obvious. There was no blood, and at first Tenzou couldn’t spot any injuries.

Kakashi crouched down beside the woman and examined her. She was pale and her blue eyes were open, her mouth hanging slack as though she’d died screaming. Tenzou was already looking around through the trees, searching for any sign of Kawaguchi, when Kakashi spoke up.

“Look at this.”

He was pointing to the woman’s arms. The sleeves of her coat had been pushed up halfway to the elbow and there was a small circle of punctures on her wrist. On closer inspection, there were similar marks on the palms of her hands. The wounds hadn’t bled much, and they’d been made so close to death that the skin hadn’t had time to bruise.

“What the hell did that?” Tenzou asked. “Are they…bite marks?” The same punctures covered the man’s wrists and hands, along with an extra ring of marks at his throat.

“Not from any animal I’ve ever seen,” Kakashi said. “Certainly not from a human.”

“Some poisoned weapon?”

“Maybe.” Kakashi sat back on his heels. “As far as I can tell, these are civilians. They don’t have any weapons, and it doesn’t look like they put up much of a fight.” He tried to bend the woman’s arm but it was stiff. “The bodies are in full rigor. They died only hours ago.”

“And Kawaguchi found them.”

“Yes.” Kakashi stood up and looked around at the snow. “There are so many tracks. Why didn’t he come straight back to us, or at least use a chakra flare to bring us to him?”

Tenzou was gazing at the marks in the snow. “Kakashi, there was someone else lying in the snow here.” He pointed to a large indentation on the other side of the man, about the size and shape of a third person. “Do you think…?” He swallowed hard, didn’t voice his thoughts aloud.

Kakashi stood up and came around the bodies to look. He was silent for a moment and then he said slowly, “I don’t think that was Kawaguchi. I think when Kawaguchi arrived, the killer was still here.”

“Lying beside the bodies? Why? You think he was injured?”

“I think he was pretending to be dead. And then when Kawaguchi came to check on him…” He trailed off.

Tenzou raised a hand to Kawaguchi’s scarf, still wrapped around his neck. He imagined he could still feel Kawaguchi’s body heat on the wool, pressed against his skin and keeping him warm. They should never have let Kawaguchi go off alone, but they had and it was his fault. If Kakashi hadn’t needed to talk to him, if he hadn’t been such an idiot yesterday at the onsen, then Kawaguchi would never have gone off by himself. After all this, if Tenzou lost him after he’d made Kawaguchi so miserable, he would never forgive himself.

“I don’t think he’s dead,” Kakashi said softly. “His body isn’t here, so he either got away or he was taken alive. And he’s strong and he’s smart – he won’t be killed as easily as these two were.”

“Right,” Tenzou said. He knew it was true, and he did have faith in Kawaguchi, but his mouth was still dry. He moved away from the bodies, careful not to trample any of the tracks. “He’ll have left a trail. We have to find him.”

“We will,” Kakashi said firmly.

It only took them a few minutes to find the set of footprints leading away from the bodies. There was only one, from a set of boots that didn’t match the tread of Kawaguchi’s shoes, heavily indented in the snow. Either the man who had walked away was heavily built, or he’d been carrying something that he weighed him down.

The forest was silent as Kakashi and Tenzou followed the footprints. Tenzou wasn’t sure if it was quiet because it was winter and the animals that would usually scurry through the undergrowth were in hibernation, or whether they’d be frightened off by the person who had recently passed through. The only sound was the crunch of their boots in the snow and the occasional soft thump as snow built up on the branches until it collapsed under its own weight and fell to the ground.

The land here was uneven, and as they approached a particularly steep rise, Kakashi stopped and put out a hand to stop Tenzou. He pointed, and Tenzou spotted the dark entrance to a cave, sloping down into the hill. The footsteps led towards it, and although he couldn’t tell from this distance whether they led inside, he was willing to bet they did.

“Let’s go,” he said, but Kakashi grabbed his arm as Tenzou tried to move past him. “What are we waiting for?” Tenzou snapped. “If Kawaguchi’s in there then he needs us!”

“I know you’re worried, Tenzou, but don’t lose your head,” Kakashi said sharply. “The last thing we want to do is spook the guy who took him or we’ll be facing a hostage situation. We need to be smart about this.”

“I don’t need to be smart to kill the fucker who took Kawaguchi,” Tenzou said darkly.

Kakashi gave him a look. It was the look that Tenzou usually gave Kakashi in situations like these. It was strange to be on the receiving end, but it did little to temper Tenzou’s impatience.

“Let’s get closer and figure out if they’re even in there,” Kakashi said. “Then we’ll figure out what to do. Remember, Tenzou, that _I’m_ the captain here, and I will do what’s best for him so just listen to me. I want to help Kawaguchi just as much as you do.”

Tenzou doubted that, but he allowed Kakashi to lead the way closer to the cave, approaching from the side and keeping the line of footprints in view. When they were only a few feet away, it became clear that the footprints did indeed lead inside, and not only that but there were several sets of tracks coming and going. It was impossible to tell whether Kawaguchi and his captor were still inside the cave or not, but they had certainly been here.

“We have to go in,” Tenzou said at once. If he’d been alone, he wouldn’t have waited at all. He was shifting from foot to foot, impatient but holding himself back. There was no way to tell how deep the cave was, but he couldn’t hear or sense anyone inside and it was making him very uneasy.

“We’ll go in slow and quiet,” Kakashi said. “You can go first, but only because I don’t trust you to focus on watching my back.” There was a note of warning in his voice that Tenzou ignored. Kakashi was more than capable of watching his own back. Tenzou had other priorities right now.

Tenzou did take it slow as they entered the cave, but only because of the darkness. As they moved further in, Kakashi cast a fire jutsu and a flame hung in the air a few feet in front of them, lighting the way. It moved with them, keeping pace ahead of Tenzou enough not to shine on him too brightly, although if anyone was in the cave then there was no way they could fail to notice the light. Still, they heard nothing.

Eventually, the shadows parted and revealed the dead end at the back of the cave, which swelled a little wider, almost like a room. Someone was using it as one, and the flickering light picked out the shape of a large wooden chest, furs and blankets strewn on the ground, an unlit lantern, and up against one of the walls was a mattress with a figure lying very still on it.

“Kawaguchi!” Tenzou was at his side in an instant, kneeling over him and touching his shoulder.

Kawaguchi’s eyes were closed and he was very pale. Whoever had lain him on the mattress had covered him with an animal fur, and as Tenzou drew it back he found that they had also bound Kawaguchi’s hands with a strip of cloth. It was too tight, cutting into his wrists, the skin dark around the restraints. Tenzou checked his pulse. It was slow but steady.

“Kawaguchi, hey, come on.” He laid a gloved hand on Kawaguchi’s cheek, and Kawaguchi stirred. His eyelashes fluttered weakly, and then he cracked his eyes open.

“Tenzou?”

“It’s me,” Tenzou said, full of relief. “I’m going to free your hands. Keep still for me, OK?” He drew a knife and carefully cut the bonds from Kawaguchi’s wrists, murmuring an apology when he nicked the skin.

“Is he OK?” Kakashi asked. He was standing by the end of the mattress, his back to them, watching the cave.

“I’m OK,” Kawaguchi said. He sat up, and Tenzou wrapped an arm around him to steady him. He still looked very pale and disoriented as he gazed around the cave. “Where the hell are we?”

“You don’t remember?” Tenzou asked.

Kawaguchi frowned and rubbed his temple. “A dead guy attacked me. At least, I think he attacked me. I don’t know what the hell he did.”

“We found the bodies, but we didn’t see whoever took you.”

Tenzou was itching to get Kawaguchi out of here, but he was leaning against Tenzou’s side and still seemed to be gathering his strength. They could give him a couple of minutes before seeing if he could stand.

“I checked his pulse,” Kawaguchi said. “I swear he didn’t have one. And then I saw his hands…God, I’ve never seen anything like it. Tenzou, his hands had teeth.”

Tenzou blinked. “They…what?”

“Little circles of teeth, or something like teeth, sticking out of his palms. Just growing straight out of the flesh, small and sharp, like fangs. And then he grabbed my wrists and it _hurt_ , he was so strong, and he…did something to me.”

Kawaguchi held up his wrists and they were marked with the same circles of puncture marks as Tenzou had seen on the bodies. The holes were scabbed over with blood but they weren’t deep and hadn’t bled much. Now his wrists weren’t tied, Tenzou could see that they were bruised where someone had gripped with enormous strength.

“It’s like he drained all the energy out of me,” Kawaguchi said. “I couldn’t break free, and I got weaker and weaker until I passed out. I still feel like shit now.”

Tenzou had never heard anything like it. He held one of Kawaguchi’s wrists, careful not to touch the bitemarks – if that’s what they truly were – and examined the wounds.

“Do they hurt?”

“They’re sore but nothing too bad.” Kawaguchi leaned against him a little more, and Tenzou tightened his arm around him, hoping to provide some comfort. “How utterly freaky. Why the hell did he bring me here instead of finishing me off like the others?”

“Maybe he was saving you for later,” Kakashi spoke up. He’d moved closer and was also looking at Kawaguchi’s wrists, frowning. “You said he drained the energy out of you. Do you mean chakra?”

Kawaguchi thought about it. “I do feel very low on chakra,” he said. “Though I didn’t get the chance to use any. You think he…sucked it out of me? I’ve never heard of a technique like that. A bloodline limit, maybe?”

“Maybe,” Kakashi said. “Those other two bodies he drained were civilians. They wouldn’t have had much chakra. Maybe between them and you, he had more than he needed, so he decided to put the leftovers in the larder to snack on when he got hungry again.”

Kawaguchi pulled a face. “Do you have to phrase it like that? You make it sound so creepy.”

“You said he had teeth in his hands but I’m the one making it creepy?”

“We have to get out of here,” Tenzou said. “Before he comes back. Can you stand?”

“I think so.”

Tenzou kept his arm around Kawaguchi, who swayed a little when he stood up, blinking against light-headedness before steadying himself. This time Kakashi led the way as they followed his flame back through the cave.

“If he shows up again, I don’t think I’ll be much use in a fight,” Kawaguchi warned. “I think he took most of my chakra.” He was tense against Tenzou’s side, and if they did come face to face with the guy who had dared lay hands on Kawaguchi and drag him off like so much fresh meat, Tenzou wouldn’t need back-up to kill him.

“I won’t let him touch you again,” he murmured, and Kawaguchi gave him a soft, grateful look. Any awkwardness between them had evaporated as soon as Kawaguchi had needed him, and Tenzou knew the same would have been true if he’d been the one attacked.

They emerged blinking out into the weak sunlight. The snow had stopped entirely, but the sun was sinking fast. There was no sign of Kawaguchi’s attacker in the woods around them.

“We have two options,” Kakashi said. “We can go to the village and stay the night there, or we can carry on towards the next safehouse. We’ll have to travel through the dark but it isn’t far. Maybe an hour away even if we walk.”

“That man might be from the village,” Tenzou said. “We don’t know if they’re friendly. I say we carry on. Even if he follows us, better to face down one opponent than a whole village full of them.”

Kakashi glanced at Kawaguchi. “Can you make it that far?”

“I think so.”

“All right. Let’s keep going.”

The woods were still silent as they headed away from the cave, retracing their steps back through the trees. When they reached the place where the bodies had been, they discovered them gone, and marks in the snow where they’d been dragged away. A single glove had been left behind, tangled in the roots of a tree. Kakashi frowned at it but didn’t suggest they stop and search for the killer. They picked up the pace after that, keeping quiet in unspoken consent in case their voices carried through the frozen landscape.

Once, some way from the spot where the bodies had been, Kawaguchi drew in a sharp breath and grabbed Tenzou’s arm. He pointed, and Tenzou saw through the trees, some way in the distance, the figure of a man, standing and watching them. Tenzou pushed Kawaguchi behind him, and although they were too far apart for him to make out the other man’s expression, he was certain their eyes locked. The other man’s eyes seemed to gleam red as though a light were reflecting off them, like a cat’s, but the dusk was so thick now that it must have been a trick of the mind. As they watched each other, the man tilted his head to the side as though considering something. Tenzou didn’t wait for him to approach. He cast a jutsu, and branches shot from the trees around the man, ends sharpened into points, aiming to run him through.

He moved among them like smoke, light on his feet and fast, almost inhumanly fast. He dodged all but the final branch, which he caught inches from his chest with a powerful grip, and as Tenzou watched the branch blackened and then crumbled to dust. Even from this distance, he could feel the sizzle as the stranger absorbed the chakra from his jutsu, leaving only a husk of dead wood behind.

Before Tenzou could try again, the man locked eyes with him one last time and then turned and fled through the trees at that same fluid speed. Tenzou blinked, and he was gone.

After that, they moved rapidly, as fast as Kawaguchi could go. Darkness fell, their way lit by another of Kakashi’s flames suspended in the air above them, and Kawaguchi grabbed Tenzou’s hand and held it tight. They didn’t speak, but they held each other, and all three of them kept close together as they travelled in tense silence through the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm reading not one but two vampire novels at the moment. The next chapter will follow on directly again.


	19. Too cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tenzou and Kawaguchi try the shocking tactic of actually talking to each other about their feelings.

The snow began falling again before they reached the safehouse, smothering all sounds in the ink-black night. Tenzou kept Kawaguchi close, aware that Kakashi’s flame would be a beacon through the trees, easy to follow, although if the man with teeth in his hands was trailing them then he was keeping his distance. Tenzou hadn’t sensed him since they’d last seen him, but he was keeping vigilant. He wished they could move faster, but Kawaguchi was conserving the little chakra he had left and so they travelled slowly, talking little and pulling their coats tighter around themselves as the cold grew bitter. Tenzou wrapped Kawaguchi’s scarf back around his neck, despite Kawaguchi’s protests, and although the air was still, the cold crept back in around his throat and stole the breath from him.

When they finally reached the safehouse, they almost missed it in the dark. Only Kakashi’s keen eyes picked out the shape of a small wooden cabin among the trees. Intricate wards had been set up around it that only activated if someone stepped close enough, but Kakashi had a seal that acted like a key in a lock, lowering the barrier to let them pass. The door was unlocked, or perhaps the seal had opened it too, and Kakashi let them inside, using his flame to light the room as he ushered them in and slid the deadbolt behind them.

They stepped into a small kitchen-living area with a fireplace against one wall and a single moth-eaten sofa before it. Built into the opposite wall was a tiny kitchenette with a two-burner stove, a sink and three cupboards, and along the far side of the room were a set of deep shelves containing medical equipment and shinobi supplies. The room was so cold that their breath came out as pale clouds, so Tenzou closed the shutters over the window and then summoned logs for the hearth. Before long they had a fire burning in the grate, shedding light and warmth through the room.

While he’d been lighting the fire, Kakashi had moved through to the check out the two other rooms and Kawaguchi had sat down on the couch, shivering as he waited for the fire to dispel the chill.

“Does this place have any other defences beside the wards?” he asked. “I don’t know how much use the barrier will be against someone who can suck the chakra right out of it.”

Tenzou considered this and then cast a jutsu. Kawaguchi jumped as a scraping sound came from the walls, moving up from the ground to the roof, and Kakashi rushed back into the room, tense and alert.

“Relax,” Tenzou said. He opened one of the shutters so they could see the brambles that had grown up around the walls, the branches thick with thorns. “I figured since he absorbs the chakra through his hands, he’s got to touch anything he wants to drain, right? I’d like to see him get his hands on these.”

“You’re not just a pretty face,” Kawaguchi said admiringly, and then flushed and looked away. But it warmed Tenzou more than the fire that he’d felt comfortable enough to fall back into familiar flirting, even if he looked embarrassed to have said it.

“We should get some sleep,” Kakashi said. “There’s a bedroom in the back with a couple of beds. You two go get some rest and I’ll sit up for first watch. Tenzou, I’ll wake you in a few hours and we can switch. I want us to leave at first light.”

“All right.” Before Tenzou went into the bedroom, he touched Kawaguchi on the shoulder. “How are your wrists?”

Kawaguchi shrugged off his coat and pulled up the sleeves of his sweater. His wrists were bruised more darkly than before but the cuts were small and clean, already scabbed over.

“They’re fine.”

“You’re sure?” Tenzou touched his hand, and Kawaguchi didn’t pull away. “I can bandage them if you like.” He brushed his thumb against the back of Kawaguchi’s hand.

“Thanks, but I think it would just make the bruising worse.” Kawaguchi flashed him a small uncertain smile before taking his hand back.

Tenzou would have said something right then if not for the presence of Kakashi behind them, rummaging through the supplies a little more loudly than he needed to. He was suddenly full of a desperate need to talk about the kiss and everything that had come after. Maybe it was because of what Kakashi had said, or because of the argument – Kawaguchi asking for some time apart still haunted him – or because of the dread that had flooded him when Kawaguchi had been taken by the enemy and Tenzou had regretted all of the things left unsaid between them. As Kawaguchi led the way into the bedroom, Tenzou followed with an impatient nervousness churning in his gut.

The heat from the main room hadn’t spread through to the bedroom, which was small and freezing. There were two twin beds that Kakashi had made up with clean sheets for them, and Tenzou made a mental note to thank him in the morning. There was a light-emitting seal tacked to the wall between the beds and Tenzou pushed some chakra into it, casting a soft glow over the room. Kawaguchi kicked off his shoes and slid into one of the beds fully dressed, pulling the duvet up around his ears.

“Fuck, it’s cold.”

Tenzou got into the other bed, unhappy about the distance between them, but it was far too cold to sit and talk. The beds were only a few feet apart, and the house was quiet. They could try to get warm and still have a conversation.

“Kawaguchi, I’m really sorry about yesterday, in the onsen,” Tenzou said. From the nest of duvet opposite him, Kawaguchi peeked out and met his gaze. He seemed so far away, but he was listening. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I never mean to upset you, but I think I’ve been doing that a lot recently.”

Kawaguchi was quiet for a moment, fidgeting with a corner of the duvet. “What were you about to say, before Kakashi interrupted?”

Tenzou cast his mind back, but mostly what he remembered of the argument was how upset Kawaguchi had looked, and the constant sizzling knowledge of their bare skin so close together in the water.

“I don’t remember,” he admitted.

“Oh,” Kawaguchi said quietly. “Never mind then.” He curled up a little tighter into his duvet cocoon and shivered so violently that Tenzou could see it.

“Are you still cold?”

“It’s freezing. I can’t get warm.”

Tenzou hesitated, but then pushed back his own covers and sat up. He hated the space between them and he felt like he was still saying the wrong thing – or at least not saying the right thing. He gathered up his duvet, crossed the room and laid it down over Kawaguchi’s bed.

“Tenzou, what –?” Kawaguchi cut off abruptly as Tenzou lifted both covers, unwrapping Kawaguchi’s cocoon, and slid into the bed with him.

It was a narrow bed, meant for one person, but Kawaguchi scooted back towards the wall and there was just enough space for Tenzou to lie facing him on the pillow, so close that their knees bumped together and Kawaguchi’s arms, curled in front of him, brushed Tenzou’s chest. Tenzou dared to lay a hand over Kawaguchi’s hands, rubbing the warmth back into them, careful not to touch his wrists.

“Better?” 

Kawaguchi’s eyes were wide in the dim light, but he nodded slowly.

There had been a time when sharing a bed, even one as small as this, had been comforting. Tenzou didn’t know when the press of Kawaguchi’s body against his own had become something that relaxed him, that made him feel safe and cared for, but there was nothing that felt so unnatural now as lying so close together yet having so little contact. He wanted to wrap his arm around Kawaguchi’s waist. He wanted Kawaguchi to drape himself over Tenzou’s body like he owned it. Tenzou hadn’t realised how much he’d taken their closeness for granted until it was gone. Now, he didn’t dare do more than lie close beside him and rub the cold from Kawaguchi’s fingers, and he felt an ache in his chest when Kawaguchi didn’t try to hold his hand.

“Tenzou,” Kawaguchi said hesitantly. “I’m really confused. Yesterday you hid in a bathroom to avoid me and today you’re climbing into bed with me. Please can you tell me what’s going on in your head? I keep thinking I have you figured out and then you say or do something that throws everything into chaos again.”

“Sorry,” Tenzou said again. “I’ve been confusing because I’ve been confused. About you. About…how I feel about you.”

His words had been quiet but they rang in his ears. There was no stepping back from the precipice of this conversation now. Tenzou’s hand stilled against Kawaguchi’s, and Kawaguchi didn’t pull away.

“Are you still confused?” Kawaguchi asked, sounding as breathless as Tenzou felt.

“A little.”

“Then tell me how you’re feeling and maybe I can help make you less confused.”

This was the part Tenzou had been impatiently longing for just minutes ago, but now that the moment was here he suddenly dreaded saying aloud to Kawaguchi all the things he had half said to Kakashi. His nerves must have shown on his face because Kawaguchi did take his hand then, hesitantly threading his fingers through Tenzou’s. It soothed Tenzou enough for him to speak.

“I’ve never been this close to anyone before,” he said. “I’ve never had someone I felt so comfortable with. You make me feel so…safe. Like I could show you all the weakest, ugliest parts of myself and you would still be there.” Was that still true? His throat hurt at the thought that it might not be and he forced himself to meet Kawaguchi’s gaze. “Have I ruined that?”

“No.” Kawaguchi shook his head vigorously and squeezed his hand. “No, I will always be here for you, Tenzou, no matter what you say right now. There is nothing you could do that would push me away unless you asked me to leave you alone.”

“When you said you wanted space from me…”

“I didn’t mean permanently. And honestly I don’t think I could have stayed away even if I’d tried. You’re that person for me as well – the person I can trust with anything. I was scared _I_ was the one who’d ruined that by kissing you.”

“You didn’t,” Tenzou said firmly, and it came back to him then, what he’d been going to say in the onsen when Kakashi had cut him off. “I wasn’t avoiding you because I was scared you were going to kiss me again. I was scared because I wanted to kiss _you_.”

Kawaguchi seemed to stop breathing for a moment and then he clutched Tenzou’s hand tighter.

“It was scary because I’m a guy?”

“Yeah, and _because_ you’re that important person to me, and I’ve never even had that with girlfriends before. I’ve only had two real relationships, and one was with a civilian, the other with a chuunin who didn’t go out on missions much. Neither of them knew I was ANBU, neither of them really knew much about me at all because I didn’t think they’d want to see it. I didn’t think they’d get it. But you see me and you get it, and if I fuck this up with you, then…”

As he’d been talking, Kawaguchi had been getting more and more agitated, and now he pressed a hand against Tenzou’s chest and blurted, “Tenzou, I’m in love with you.”

The rest of Tenzou’s sentence vanished, along with every other thought in his head.

“So you can never fuck things up with me,” Kawaguchi said, talking fast as though each word had been burning his insides and he needed to get them out. “Even if it’s scary and you want to take your time and figure this out, I can wait. And even if…” He trailed off, took a breath and said, “Even if you realise you don’t want to be anything more than friends, I’ll still be here. I don’t want to lose you either. I _need_ you, Tenzou, I need you right here in my life, and I’ve tried to get over you so many times but I just can’t.”

Tenzou tugged his hand gently out of Kawaguchi’s grip, and Kawaguchi looked at him with such naked fear that Tenzou felt a physical ache in his chest. His whole body was reacting to Kawaguchi’s confession: his pulse was stammering nonsense in his ears, his heart had grown large enough to squeeze his lungs against his ribcage, and he felt feverish with heat. He wrapped his arm around Kawaguchi and pulled him close and it felt so right, like coming home after months outside in the cold.

He’d meant to say something, but Kawaguchi’s face was so close and Tenzou was struck all over again by how beautiful he was. It suddenly seemed so stupid that he could have thought he only wanted Kawaguchi in some other body, some other gender, like he might not be perfect exactly how he was.

Tenzou kissed him. Kawaguchi’s lips were just as soft as he remembered, and Kawaguchi made a small noise and rested his hand very lightly on Tenzou’s jaw, as if even now he wasn’t certain he was allowed to touch. The kiss had started gentle, but Tenzou pressed closer, parted Kawaguchi’s lips with his own so he could kiss him deeper. That must have been the right thing to do because Kawaguchi’s hand slid up into his hair and he started kissing back as though he wasn’t scared Tenzou was going to pull away at any moment.

To further drive the point home, Tenzou pushed Kawaguchi onto his back, barely breaking the kiss as he swung a leg over him, their bodies now touching the whole way down. Kawaguchi wound both arms around Tenzou’s neck, and Tenzou wondered distractedly how he’d ever managed to stop kissing Kawaguchi last time. Why the hell he’d thought he wanted to.

When he did finally pull back just a couple of inches, he was treated to Kawaguchi’s smile, and he was so relieved to have caused a real smile that he almost kissed Kawaguchi again.

“I’m picking up on some subtle signals that maybe you’re less confused now,” Kawaguchi said.

“I’m very confused about why I didn’t do this earlier,” Tenzou said, and was delighted when Kawaguchi laughed.

“Does this mean you want me to stop dating other crappy guys?”

“You always had the worst taste in men. I’m saving you from yourself.”

“My hero.”

Kawaguchi’s fingers carded through his hair, and his smile became softer.

“We can take this as slow as you want,” he murmured. “It’s OK if you’re still nervous. I’m nervous too. But not as much as I was before.”

“Me neither. Who knew this whole talking to each other thing would actually work out?”

In fact, Tenzou felt lighter than he’d done in months. All the stress and worry had slipped from his fingers, and only now did he realise he’d been the one choosing to carry that weight. He could have let it go at any point and hadn’t had the courage to try.

“Can I sleep here with you tonight?” he asked. He’d never sleep if he went back to his own bed, not after this. He didn’t want even a few feet between them right now.

“Of course you can.” Kawaguchi tugged him gently down until Tenzou’s head rested on his shoulder. Tenzou shifted off him enough that he could rest his hip on the mattress again, still half covering Kawaguchi but not crushing him. “I’m not cold anymore,” Kawaguchi said. “Stay here and keep me warm.”

Tenzou was more than happy to. Sure, Kakashi would come to wake him up in a few hours, but Tenzou didn’t care if he found them cuddled up together. He wouldn’t trade this moment for the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Finally_


	20. Maybe don't give 110%

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kawaguchi tilted his head to one side. “I brought you here so you wouldn’t stress over work, but you seem determined to find _something_ to stress about. What’s making you worry about this all of a sudden?”
> 
> “I just want to be a good boyfriend,” Tenzou said a little helplessly.

“Are you working late again?”

Tenzou looked up as Kawaguchi perched on the edge of his desk. 

“It’s only ten minutes after shift change,” he said. “Why are you still here? I thought you’d gone already.”

Kawaguchi gave him a look as though he were deeply disappointed in him. He’d already changed out of his ANBU armour into jeans and a loose tank top, and he shimmied back onto Tenzou’s desk a little more so he could pull his legs up and cross them under him.

“I’m waiting for you.”

Tenzou had been about to scold him for sitting on the desk, but now he frowned, suddenly worried he’d forgotten something important. “Did we have plans?”

“No, but I’ve barely seen you this week and I miss you.”

Tenzou glanced around to make sure no one was in eavesdropping distance. They weren’t. He instantly felt guilty for checking, because it wasn’t like he cared if anyone suspected he and Kawaguchi had transitioned from friends to something more, but technically ANBU operatives weren’t allowed to date their teammates. It still happened, of course, clandestinely, and most people would turn a blind eye, but it had only been a couple of weeks and Tenzou was still paranoid that the wrong person would notice and report them.

“Relax,” Kawaguchi soothed him. He didn’t look offended in the slightest but Tenzou was also paranoid that eventually he would be. “Leave whatever you’re working on until tomorrow and come hang out at my place tonight.”

Tenzou turned back to his computer screen and chewed on his lip. “I promised Miho I’d help her out with some reports while her arm is still in the cast, and I haven’t finished them yet.”

“And they can’t wait until the morning because…?”

“Because Kakashi asked me to do some extra training with his team, and Tadaomi said he needed help with the admin work so I said I’d spend a couple of hours on that…”

Kawaguchi grabbed a pen and a pad of post-it notes from Tenzou’s desk drawer and scribbled something on the top note.

“You’ve got to stop being so helpful,” he said as he wrote. “If you’re not careful you’re going to burn out.”

“I always do extra work if someone needs me,” Tenzou said. “I haven’t burnt out yet.”

“Yeah, well, you have an extra demand on your attention now. Me. I demand your attention. So everyone else will have to get used to you turning them down from now on.”

He turned the pad around so Tenzou could see what he’d written. In a perfect imitation of Tenzou’s handwriting he’d scribbled _Sorry, can’t make the extra training_ and signed it with Tenzou’s name.

“When did you learn how to forge my handwriting?”

“Oh, years ago.” Kawaguchi waved an airy hand. “I’m gonna go stick this to Kakashi’s desk and when I get back you better be shutting down that computer.”

Tenzou glanced back at his report. He’d only just started it, and there was so much to write. But on the other hand, he’d missed Kawaguchi too, and they’d only just started this whole relationship thing. Tenzou didn’t want to put that in danger when they’d only just begun. As Kawaguchi hopped off the desk, Tenzou saved his document and shut down the computer. Any anxiety he felt over leaving a job unfinished was smoothed away when Kawaguchi beamed at him and practically skipped over to Kakashi’s desk as though Tenzou had just made his entire evening. Tenzou stared after him, wondering how many times he could fall for the same person.

They picked up dinner on the way home, and once they’d turned onto Kawaguchi’s street, Kawaguchi held his hand and gave him a soft, questioning glance to check it was OK. He’d been giving Tenzou that look a lot, and Tenzou felt both grateful for it and guilty that Kawaguchi found it necessary.

Once they were inside Kawaguchi’s flat, he put the bag of food down on the kitchen counter and pulled Kawaguchi in for a kiss.

“Does it bother you?” he asked when they separated. “That we haven’t told people?”

Kawaguchi still had his arms loosely wrapped around Tenzou’s neck. “No. Almost everyone who needs to know already knows. It bothers me that we haven’t told Miho yet.”

It bothered Tenzou too. They’d meant to, but somehow the right opportunity hadn’t presented itself.

“But I mean…you know it’s not because I _wouldn’t_ tell people, right?”

Kawaguchi tilted his head to one side. “I brought you here so you wouldn’t stress over work, but you seem determined to find _something_ to stress about. What’s making you worry about this all of a sudden?”

“I just want to be a good boyfriend,” Tenzou said a little helplessly.

Kawaguchi pulled him into a hug. “Tenzou, sweetie, you were the best boyfriend I ever had before you were even my boyfriend.” He nuzzled his cheek against Tenzou’s, and Tenzou half relaxed against him but not fully because he had to be _sure_.

“When you held my hand outside, you looked at me like you thought I might not want you to,” he said.

“Well I’m not going to out you without your permission,” Kawaguchi said. “The ANBU no dating rule is its own thing, but being queer in public is something else. I’m not going to just assume you’re comfortable with it.”

Tenzou had never even thought about being outed. Sure, he was dating a guy now, and he hadn’t had two gay best friends for years without noticing the looks they got sometimes, the muttered comments, the snubs. Tenzou couldn’t lie and say the attention wouldn’t bother him. He was a private person to begin with and hadn’t even publicised his relationships with women. As far as he was concerned, his love life wasn’t anyone’s business but his own and his partner’s.

But Kawaguchi wasn’t like that. Despite, or perhaps because of his skills at deception, he was always so open with his feelings in his personal life. He didn’t let anyone tell him to hide part of himself away, and for the most part he genuinely didn’t seem to care if he rubbed some people the wrong way. In a lot of ways, he and Tenzou were total opposites, and although this had never caused problems in their friendship, that might not hold true for a romantic relationship.

“I don’t mind if people know we’re together,” Tenzou said. “I’ll deal with it. I just want you to be happy.”

“I _am_ happy, Tenzou,” Kawaguchi said. He cupped Tenzou’s cheeks, and his hands were a little chilly but Tenzou didn’t mind. “I’m happy every day when I wake up and remember that you want to be with me. You don’t need to try so hard to make everything perfect. I might not have the best track record when it comes to relationships but even I know the key to a lasting relationship is compromise.”

_Lasting_ , he’d said. During the years they’d known each other, Kawaguchi’s relationships had been frequent and short. Three or four months at the most. And Tenzou knew this wasn’t like that, he really did, but he wanted to be better than all the other men who had come before him, just to make sure.

He must have still looked worried because Kawaguchi stroked his thumbs gently over Tenzou’s cheekbones.

“What are you thinking right now?” he asked.

“That I managed to mess things up before we even got together, and now we _are_ together I don’t want to do it again.”

“Oh, baby.” Kawaguchi kissed him very softly on the lips. “It’s OK to mess things up a little bit. It’s OK to be uncomfortable while we find our footing. For the record, you haven’t done anything wrong, but if I was unhappy with anything, I would tell you and then we’d sort it out. And that has to go both ways, OK? That’s why I keep checking you’re all right with what I’m doing, because I want to make you happy too. Not ‘content’, not ‘putting up with it to please Kawaguchi’ – really, properly happy.”

Tenzou nodded. He pulled Kawaguchi flush against him again and held him close. This by itself was something new. Before, Kawaguchi had almost always been the one to initiate hugs and displays of physical affection. After an initial period of resistance at the start of their friendship, Tenzou had accepted it and enjoyed it, but it wasn’t in his nature to casually touch someone just because he cared about them. He was working on changing that, not for Kawaguchi’s sake but for his own. It felt freeing to hug Kawaguchi or kiss him or grab his hand just because he could. Just because he wanted to.

“Promise you’ll tell me if you’re getting stressed out again?” Kawaguchi asked. “Over us or anything else?”

“I promise,” Tenzou said.

“And stop spending so much time at work. Now I have you, I want to spend as much time with you as possible. And if you’d rather write reports than make out with me then I will be _very_ offended.”

Tenzou snorted. “Depends what the report is about.”

Kawaguchi poked his cheek reproachfully. “You’re lucky you’re hot.”

“Will you forgive me if we do some of that making out you wanted?”

“Dinner will get cold,” Kawaguchi said, but that wasn’t a no, and when Tenzou kissed his neck he tilted his head back in encouragement.

“We can heat it up later.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rest of the prompts are going to be more disjointed again but they'll all be established relationship now these two idiots finally got together <3


	21. Who turned out the lights?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tenzou had imagined all sorts of scenarios for how they would tell Miho but he’d never once considered breaking their relationship status to her underground in a tomb lined with bodies.

The Uchiha family crypt was in the old graveyard in the south of the village. Tenzou had never visited these graves before, and although it was early afternoon and the sun was high in the sky, the heavy iron gates lent a foreboding aura to the graveyard. They were closed but unlocked, and the hinges squeaked as Miho pushed them open. The original clans had all buried their dead here, before the graveyard had run out of space, and even in death they had wanted to make their mark on the village. No simple headstones for the founding families of Konoha: there were mausoleums above ground, crypts below, and granite statues carved in the image of the dead men and women, resting in repose above their own bodies below.

The entrance to the Uchiha crypt was at the very back of the graveyard. There was a small marble building, like the Senju mausoleum, but inside there were no coffins, only an open hole in the ground revealing the stone steps that led down into the darkness.

“There are wards down here, so we can’t use any jutsu once we’re inside,” Miho told them.

“What’ll happen if we do?” Kawaguchi asked, squinting down the stairway. It was so dark that only the first few steps were visible.

“Not sure,” Miho said. “It’s not like any of them are left alive to tell us.”

“There’s that one kid.”

“Yeah, and I’m sure his parents taught him all about the booby traps guarding their ancestors’ remains when he was still a toddler.” Miho pressed the button on an electric torch. Its beam was inconsequential in the daylight, barely visible, but once they were underground it would be all they had to see by.

Tenzou switched on his own torch and followed her as she started to descend the stairs. Kawaguchi came down behind him, their footsteps soft on the worn steps.

“I can’t believe they sent a team out for this,” Kawaguchi grumbled. “Let alone an ANBU team. I get that it’s a clan crypt, but none of them are left to get offended if we just sent a chuunin.”

“That’s what I said,” Miho said dryly. “Apparently whoever saw the alleged ghost was someone with clout. I bet it was one of those old council fogies.”

They reached the bottom of the staircase, which opened into a narrow corridor lined on one side with old wooden coffins set into niches in the wall. The air smelt of dust and old decay. Tenzou wrinkled his nose. The coffins didn’t bother him – he’d seen too many fresh bodies to care much about those long dead – but he could sense the wards like a hum vibrating through his back teeth and it put him on edge.

“Creepy,” Kawaguchi commented.

Tenzou turned back to look at him. “You seem remarkably calm about checking out an allegedly haunted crypt. I thought you’d be clinging to me as soon as we entered the graveyard.”

“Nah, it’s obviously fake. Some kids playing a prank or something.”

“How’d you figure that?”

Kawaguchi shone his torch over the nearest coffin. There were eyes carved into the side, and the play of light and shadow made it seem as though they moved, gazing after them as they passed by.

“If the Uchiha ghosts were going to come back, they wouldn’t sulk at their gravesite. Not their style. They’d be jumping out of wardrobes and screeching in the night and popping out of the shadows with glowing red eyes. Probably in their house. That’s where they died, after all.”

“So it’s not that you don’t believe in ghosts,” Miho said. “You just don’t think this one is scary enough to be real.”

“Right! Though I’m happy to act scared if it means Tenzou will hold my hand.”

Tenzou glanced at Miho, who didn’t even look back at them. They still hadn’t told her. Hadn’t seen much of her lately, in or out of work. This was their first mission together – if they could really call it a mission – since she had broken her arm. She’d finally had the cast removed, but while it had been on she’d been confined to the offices, helping out with admin work and slowly going stir-crazy. It had been three weeks since Tenzou and Kawaguchi had come back from the Land of Hot Water and Tenzou was starting to get anxious. They needed to find a time to tell her soon, because the longer this went on, the more upset she’d be when they finally said something.

As if reading his mind, Miho said, “Did you two finally sort out whatever was making you avoid each other?”

Tenzou faltered in his next step. “We weren’t avoiding each other.”

“Yes you were. You were acting really weird around each other for ages.” She glanced back at them. “What even happened? I asked Kawaguchi but he wouldn’t tell me.”

That surprised Tenzou. He’d assumed that Kawaguchi had told Miho about the kiss at least. He’d told Kakashi.

Kawaguchi caught Tenzou’s eye in an unspoken question. Tenzou had imagined all sorts of scenarios for how they would tell Miho but he’d never once considered breaking their relationship status to her underground in a tomb lined with bodies. But at least they finally had some privacy.

“So we’ve kind of been meaning to tell you something,” Kawaguchi started.

Further down the corridor, something moved. Tenzou swung his torch towards it, thought he saw a figure trying to press itself deeper into the shadows. Not a ghost. Someone solid and alive.

“Hey, who’s there?” he yelled.

Miho started towards it, drawing a knife from her belt, and the intruder panicked, his hands flying through the signs of a jutsu before Miho could reach him.

“Don’t!” Miho barked, but it was too late.

There was a crackle of chakra, and then the wards flared to life with a sudden flash of light. The intruder screamed, and Tenzou tasted electricity at the back of his tongue. Every hair on his body stood on end and he dropped his torch instinctively so his hands would be free, but there was nothing he could fight against.

It was over in an instant. He saw the intruder keel over, and then the light of the wards died away, leaving them in total darkness.

He heard Kawaguchi behind him slapping his torch against his palm, but they’d been shorted out by the power surge from the wards. Tenzou couldn’t see anything, even when he raised a hand and waved it in front of his face.

“Well, fuck,” Miho said. “Who the hell was that?”

The air smelt like singed flesh, and if the intruder was still alive then he wasn’t making any sounds. Tenzou started to reach out towards the wall and then thought better of it. Instead he reached backwards towards Kawaguchi, touched an arm guard and then felt Kawaguchi’s fingers brush his own.

“Want me to go fetch a medic and some light?” Kawaguchi asked.

“Please,” Miho said. “Though I think he might be beyond help, whoever he is. Be careful.”

“I will.” Kawaguchi squeezed Tenzou’s hand and then let go, and Tenzou heard him heading slowly back towards the staircase.

In the other direction, he could hear Miho moving towards the fried shinobi. He followed her as best he could, on the off chance she was going to need back-up. He doubted it. The Uchiha weren’t known for half-assing things.

“No pulse,” Miho said a moment later. “He’s wearing a hitai-ate.” Another pause. “OK, I can’t tell which village symbol is on here, but there’s a gouge through it so he’s a missing nin. Or maybe she. I’m not about to feel up a corpse to find out.”

“Good to know,” Tenzou said. He tugged his mask round to the side of his head. There was no point keeping it on while no one could see him and it wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. “He must have been hiding out down here. Or grave robbing. You want any help?”

“I don’t want to try moving him without a light. Let’s just sit tight until Kawaguchi comes back. In the meantime, what was Kawaguchi about to tell me before this idiot set off the wards?”

“Uh.” Tenzou looked away even though neither of them could see each other. “Well, you see…we meant to tell you much earlier…but Kawaguchi and I…”

He stopped talking as he heard footsteps coming back down the passageway. Surely Kawaguchi couldn’t be coming back already. And there was no light.

“Bad news,” Kawaguchi’s voice called down the passage. “The door is locked. The wards must have sealed us in.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Miho muttered. “If Fugaku were still alive I’d be having words with him when we get out of here. This is overkill of the highest order.”

“Someone will come looking for us when we don’t come back, right?” Tenzou said uneasily. “They do know we’re down here?”

“Yeah, they know. But I don’t know how long it’ll be before we’re missed. We might be stuck here for a while.”

“At least we have all these corpses for company,” Kawaguchi said cheerfully. “You’re never alone in a graveyard.”

His hand bumped against Tenzou’s elbow, and then slid down his arm to hold his hand. He rested his chin on Tenzou’s shoulder, a strange yet comforting sensation without any vision. Tenzou turned his face towards him and felt Kawaguchi’s hair brush against his cheek.

“OK, so now we’re stuck down here for the next few hours, how about you two finally spill whatever you were going to tell me,” Miho said.

It seemed like they’d run out of interruptions, for better or worse. Tenzou felt a small rush of air against his neck as Kawaguchi sighed, and then Kawaguchi nuzzled gently against his jaw before pulling away. If Miho could only see them, she would know exactly what they were about to tell her.

“Tenzou and I are dating,” Kawaguchi said.

There was a beat of silence. Tenzou tried hard not to picture what expressions were flitting over Miho’s face.

“Yeah, you wish,” Miho said. “What is it really?”

Kawaguchi let out a bark of laughter, which became a full giggle he couldn’t seem to stop. Tenzou nudged him in the side but Kawaguchi evidently found Miho’s dry disbelief hilarious because he only laughed harder.

“He’s not kidding,” Tenzou said. “We really are.”

Miho was silent for a little longer this time. “You’re seriously not messing with me? You two got together?”

“We can make out for you if that would help you believe us,” Kawaguchi said between giggles.

“No, we will not,” Tenzou said firmly.

“What the hell?” Miho burst out. “Out of _all_ the guys you could have turned for, you chose Kawaguchi? Really, Tenzou?”

Kawaguchi dissolved into another bout of hysterics.

“No offence,” Miho added. “But out of him and Kakashi…”

“I would rather _die_ ,” Tenzou said with feeling.

“Oh, so dating Kawaguchi and dying are on the same level then,” Miho said, as though that made sense.

“Miho,” Kawaguchi gasped. “What did I ever do to you?”

“Where do I even begin?” Miho asked darkly. “Tenzou, did you enter this relationship of your own free will? Do you need help?”

Tenzou rubbed his temple. Why were his teammates like this?

“You know what? Maybe we will make out in front of you.”

“I don’t know if that’s a threat or a promise,” Miho mused. “I’m going to have to decide how I feel about this. Keep the making out on ice until I figure out if it’s hot or disturbing.”

“You know what?” Tenzou said. “That’s it, I quit this team. Bye.”

“You don’t get to quit,” Miho said, and she had the audacity to sound offended. “But I am going to implement a policy of no fucking on missions.”

“Actually, I’m quitting ANBU altogether. Expect my resignation letter as soon as we get out of this crypt.”

“On the positive side,” Miho added, “at least Kawaguchi has finally improved his taste in men. I never thought I’d see the day when he picked someone who wasn’t a total dirtbag.”

“Hey, those dirtbags were all really hot,” Kawaguchi protested. He was still hanging off Tenzou’s arm, otherwise Tenzou might have made a tactical retreat back to the staircase.

“Can we change the subject?” Tenzou asked.

“How long have you been together without telling me?” Miho asked.

“Three weeks.”

“In that case, no, we can’t change the subject,” Miho said. “I’m going to ask you a series of embarrassing personal questions and I expect you to answer them all. Consider this a lesson against keeping secrets from your captain.”

“What do you want to know?” Kawaguchi chirped with zero shame and far too much enjoyment.

“I hate you both,” Tenzou said.

“I’m shocked, Tenzou,” Miho said. “Is that any way to speak to your boyfriend?”

“Or your captain?” Kawaguchi added.

“Maybe your taste in men hasn’t improved as much as I thought, Kawaguchi.”

“What can I say, I have a thing for bad boys.”

Tenzou pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a very loud sigh. Rescue could not come quickly enough. It was going to be a long wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So October is over but I want to fill in the rest of the prompts so I'm going to continue updating until they're all done! I'm also doing nanowrimo this month and that takes priority so I can't guarantee how quick updates will be but day one has gone well!
> 
> Also, in case anyone is interested, a new discord server just opened for Tenzou fans. If you want to chat about Tenzou with other cool people (and also me) then check out [the server tumblr](https://tenzoscabin.tumblr.com/) for info and an invite!


	22. General hospital

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the bed, Kawaguchi lay still, an IV drip in his arm and a heart rate monitor beside the bed recording an elevated pulse. The doctors had poked and prodded him at first but they’d been quick to declare that there was no medical way to wake someone from a genjutsu this deep.

Kakashi closed his sharingan eye and sighed. He cocked his head and frowned at the motionless figure in the hospital bed.

“Well?” Tenzou asked, just as Miho said, “Can you do anything?”

The three of them were crowded around the bed in the private room, which was small and felt airless despite the open window. Tenzou had been in here almost constantly during the past three days and the room had been full more often than not. His stress levels were already high, but they’d risen even higher every time he’d had to make conversation at Kawaguchi’s bedside with relatives and friends, recounting again and again what had happened on the mission. At least Kakashi was here to try and help. Tenzou would repeat the story a thousand more times if that’s what it took for Kawaguchi to wake up.

In the bed, Kawaguchi lay still, an IV drip in his arm and a heart rate monitor beside the bed recording an elevated pulse. His eyes were closed but they moved restlessly beneath the lids, and although his skin was pale, he looked otherwise perfectly healthy, as though he were merely sleeping and might wake at any minute. He’d looked on the cusp of waking for three days now. The doctors had poked and prodded him at first but they’d been quick to declare that there was no medical way to wake someone from a genjutsu this deep.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kakashi said. He leaned over Kawaguchi as if searching for some sign of consciousness, but nothing had changed.

“That’s what Inoichi said,” Miho told him. Her voice was tight with worry. “He managed to get in deep enough to glimpse the illusion, but then it kicked him out. Kicked him out! Have you ever heard of a genjutsu that strong?”

Kakashi hadn’t stopped staring at Kawaguchi’s face, as though if he only scrutinised the problem enough he’d be able to see the solution.

“Not first hand,” he said. “But there are stories of genjutsu powerful enough to put whole cities to sleep for days.”

Tenzou was standing by Kawaguchi’s hip, giving Kakashi the space he needed and not an inch more. While the other two spoke, he quietly slipped his hand into Kawaguchi’s, hoping that wherever Kawaguchi’s mind was, he’d feel comforted by the touch. Kawaguchi didn’t react, and Tenzou told himself he hadn’t expected a reaction anyway, but he still felt the bitter tang of disappointment.

“Can you wake him up?” he asked.

Kakashi didn’t outright say no, but he didn’t say yes either. He glanced at the machines tracking Kawaguchi’s vitals as if they’d be able to give him a clue.

“I’ll keep trying,” he said. “Tell me again everything you can about the person who did this.”

Miho let out a frustrated sigh. She’d probably told the story even more times than Tenzou.

“I didn’t recognise him from the Bingo Book,” she said. “He didn’t have any obvious bloodline limit but I didn’t get a good look at him. There were two other shinobi on his team and they were strong enough to take up most of my attention.”

“Mine too,” Tenzou said. He’d spent so much time since then going over the skirmish, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong, how he could have saved Kawaguchi from going one on one with the shinobi he’d falsely assumed was the weakest of the three. Physically he had been, but he’d managed to catch all three of them in a genjutsu in the middle of a battle. Kawaguchi had got the worst of it, by accident or design.

“I didn’t see what happened,” Miho said, and she seemed to grow more frustrated with those words the more she repeated them. “I don’t even know when it began. It was so smooth. We were fighting for real and then…we were still fighting, but it was a genjutsu. I’ve tried to put it together from the injuries I remember getting and the ones I really have, but I still can’t be sure.”

“Did you see anything out of the corner of your eye like a light or a colour that didn’t belong?” Kakashi asked. “Or did you hear a strange sound?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t remember anything. Damnit, I don’t know what he did, Kakashi! It was real one minute and fake the next, but I don’t know _which_ minute. I only realised when I…” She swallowed hard. “When I died. Then I woke up and found myself on the ground, the enemies gone, and these two passed out beside me.” She gestured at Tenzou and Kawaguchi.

Kakashi glanced at Tenzou. “And you died too, in your dream?”

Tenzou nodded. It had felt so real that when he’d opened his eyes the world around him had been less substantial than the fake memories of bleeding out on the forest floor. He had been convinced for several long seconds that he was dead and the world around him was the afterlife.

Kakashi looked back at Kawaguchi and sighed again. “So what was different about you?” he muttered.

Tenzou looked down at Kawaguchi’s hand in his. He would have given anything to feel a squeeze, or even a twitch of the fingers. Anything to let him know that Kawaguchi was fighting to wake up. That he _would_ wake up.

“It can’t last forever, right?” he asked. “No one’s that powerful. He’ll have to wake up in another few days no matter what…right?”

Kakashi didn’t answer.

  


* * *

  


Tenzou finally left the hospital room when evening rolled around. Kakashi was still patiently working on trying to undo the genjutsu, and Tenzou tried to take comfort in that. He hadn’t wanted to leave at all. Miho had left earlier to start her shift, but Tenzou had worked the morning and had nothing to keep him occupied until tomorrow. Only when Kakashi had strongly implied that he might work better if Tenzou wasn’t there to distract him had Tenzou finally given in to his body’s needs. He was tired and hungry and strangely exhausted despite sitting by Kawaguchi’s bedside for several hours.

Before he’d left, he’d leaned down and kissed Kawaguchi’s forehead, and he was almost sure that Kawaguchi’s heart rate had come down a notch. Tenzou didn’t like to think about what was causing that rapid pulse. It was nothing physiological, the doctors had said. It was a stress response to whatever he was seeing. They’d said it like it was a piece of good news, but Tenzou hated to think that Kawaguchi was trapped in a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from. A nightmare that had lasted days. He forced his mind away from thoughts of what Kawaguchi might be seeing.

It took him a long while to get to sleep that night. Kawaguchi slept over now more often than not, and the bed felt empty without him there. Tenzou pulled the other pillow – the one on Kawaguchi’s side of the bed – into his arms and hugged it against his chest, feeling a little pathetic, but he could smell Kawaguchi’s shampoo on the pillow and it helped to close his eyes and breathe it in.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept for when he was jerked back to wakefulness by a knock at the door. The night was thick with darkness, and Tenzou was still trying to adjust to it as he made his way out of the bedroom, trying not to trip over anything in his haste to get to the door.

Kakashi was standing outside. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on at the hospital and the skin underneath his visible eye was dark and tired, but he was alert.

“Kawaguchi woke up,” he said, and then smacked a hand against the door frame as Tenzou tried to move past him.

“Out of the way,” Tenzou said, but Kakashi didn’t move.

“You’re wearing pyjamas,” Kakashi pointed out. “Let’s get you dressed and then we can go straight to the hospital and see him. OK?” He spoke gently but his arm across the doorway was firm.

“Is he all right?” Tenzou asked, not moving.

He knew by the look in Kakashi’s eye that the answer was no.

“We need to talk before you see him,” Kakashi said. “Trust me, Tenzou. I wouldn’t keep you away from him for a single second unless I had a good reason.”

Tenzou did trust him, although it didn’t mean he had to like obeying. He stepped back and let Kakashi into the flat. He hadn’t turned on the light, had forgotten it was even an option, and when Kakashi flicked the switch it left him blinking hard against the sudden brightness.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I broke the genjutsu a couple of hours ago,” Kakashi said, and held up a hand to ward off Tenzou’s explosion of anger. “I couldn’t come fetch you straight away. He needed me. I came as soon as I could.”

“You could have sent someone!” Tenzou couldn’t believe Kakashi had let him sleep for _two hours_ while Kawaguchi had been awake! Those were two hours he could have spent by Kawaguchi’s side.

“I thought you could use the sleep,” Kakashi said. “And it’s just as well I didn’t. I need to tell you what he’s been dreaming.”

Tenzou didn’t want to know, and at the same time it was the only thing he wanted to know.

“Then tell me,” he said.

Despite Kakashi’s insistence on telling this now, he hesitated. Tenzou waited impatiently while he searched for the right words.

“It started the same way yours did,” Kakashi said after a moment, in a slow voice that meant he was leading up to something very bad and hadn’t yet figured out how to phrase it. “He was fighting in real life and then at some point the fight was only in his mind. But whereas you and Miho experienced your own deaths…Kawaguchi didn’t die.”

He paused, and his expression made Tenzou think of all the things that could be worse than death.

“Just say it,” he said. “Whatever happened, just say it.”

“You died,” Kakashi said. “He watched you die.”

At first, Tenzou was only relieved that it hadn’t been something worse. He’d been imagining torture and pain, and it seemed like a mercy that the person hurt in the illusion had been a false version of himself. And then he thought about how he’d feel if he saw Kawaguchi killed right in front of him. And then he thought about the days that had come afterwards and remembered that this was only the beginning.

Kakashi had been watching him closely, letting this sink in, and now he continued talking, quietly, calmly, but relentlessly.

“He was too upset to tell me the whole story,” he said, “but from what I picked up, everything happened just like it would in real life. He and Miho brought your body back to Konoha. He went to your funeral. He never realised it was a genjutsu. It was using his memories to construct itself, to bring in other people, places, all the details that might have clued him in that something was wrong. Even when he woke up, he thought you were dead. He still thinks you’re dead.”

“You didn’t _tell_ him?” Tenzou demanded. He was reeling from the very idea, imagining their positions reversed, how those three days of grief must have felt.

“Of course I did,” Kakashi said in a tone that was supposed to be soothing, but nothing could soothe Tenzou right now. “As soon as he opened his eyes I told him he’d been in a genjutsu. And when he started talking about the things he’d seen I told him over and over again that you were alive, but he wouldn’t believe me. He was very disorientated. Very…upset.”

Tenzou had heard enough. He brushed past Kakashi, stepped into his shoes and reached for the front door, but Kakashi grabbed his arm.

“You’re not dressed,” Kakashi reminded him. Tenzou tried to shake off his arm but he wouldn’t loosen his grip.

“I don’t care!” Tenzou whirled around. “If you want to keep that hand, _let go of me_.”

Kakashi let go.

Tenzou sprinted out of the house, the door hanging open behind him. What did he care if Kakashi left it open or closed? Or if anyone saw him racing through the streets in pyjamas? It didn’t matter. None of that mattered! He needed to be at the hospital two hours ago. He should never have left! What had he been thinking, going home when Kawaguchi needed him? He could have slept in his chair at the hospital. But he hadn’t, and to make up for his failings he had to get there _now_.

No one looked at him twice as he moved through the hospital building. The corridors were mostly empty, but patients in pyjamas were not uncommon, and no one tried to stop him and tell him that visiting hours were over. Not that he would have stopped for anyone. He’d memorised the winding route to Kawaguchi’s room, and he made his way there in record time without a single wrong turn through the maze-like corridors.

The door was shut, but in the midnight quiet of the hospital he made out voices from inside before he reached it. As he turned the handle, one voice rose in volume and he recognised it as Miho’s.

He opened the door, and the first thing he saw was Miho in full uniform standing between Kawaguchi’s bed and a nurse. Between them, they blocked the view of the bed.

“- just a mild sedative,” the nurse was saying, and Tenzou noticed the syringe in her hand, full of clear liquid.

“Get out!” Miho snapped. “He doesn’t need a _sedative_ , he needs me and he needs…” She caught sight of Tenzou in the doorway. “Oh, thank God you’re here,” she said, and the nurse turned too. Miho took the opportunity to snatch the syringe and then place a hand between the woman’s shoulder blades, forcing her towards the door. Tenzou had to step aside to let Miho push her out, and as he did he caught sight of Kawaguchi.

Kawaguchi didn’t see him. He was sitting in the bed, knees drawn up to his chest and face buried in his arms. His shoulders were shaking gently but he didn’t make a sound.

Tenzou’s instinct was to pull Kawaguchi straight into his arms, but he held back, not wanting to shock him or upset him even more. Miho was still arguing with the nurse at the door, but Tenzou ignored them. He moved around the bed and then softly sat down beside Kawaguchi’s legs. Kawaguchi shifted a little, sensing his presence but not looking up. He was wearing a hospital gown, which had ridden up around his thighs, and there were goose bumps on his bare legs. Tenzou rested a hand on his foot, the skin chilly.

“Kawaguchi,” he said softly.

The effect was electric. Kawaguchi’s head shot up and he recoiled from Tenzou’s touch as if his hand had thorns. He stared with wide eyes, red from crying, shocked, frightened, disbelieving.

“T-Tenzou?”

“It’s me,” Tenzou said. He didn’t try to reach out again but, God, he wanted to. He couldn’t stand seeing all that pain on Kawaguchi’s face. There were tears stains on his cheeks; Tenzou had only ever seen Kawaguchi cry three or four times in the years they’d known each other, and every time he’d hoped it would be the last time.

“Is this real?” Kawaguchi asked. It came out as a whisper, desperate and needy. His gaze was fixed on Tenzou’s face as though Tenzou might vanish if he blinked.

“Yes,” Tenzou said. “I’m alive.”

He would have said more, but Kawaguchi threw himself forwards into Tenzou’s arms, and Tenzou scooped him into his lap and held him tight. Kawaguchi was crying again. Not the silent, restrained tears that Tenzou had seen from him before but full body-wracking sobs. He buried his face in Tenzou’s shoulder, and Tenzou could feel the tears, hot and wet through the thin fabric of his shirt.

Over the years, Tenzou had occasionally imagined what would happen if he died. If anyone would mourn him, if his absence would mean anything more than one less mask among the ranks of faceless ANBU. He had decided that no one would cry at his funeral. There might be a few who would miss him, but not enough to lose the tight control they’d all been trained to have over their emotions.

He’d been wrong.

Kawaguchi was crying too hard to speak so Tenzou didn’t say anything. Instead he held Kawaguchi together as he fell apart, and when Kawaguchi pressed a palm to Tenzou’s chest to feel the beat of his heart, Tenzou had to close his eyes, his own throat aching with emotion.

It took a long while for Kawaguchi to stop crying. At some point Tenzou glanced up and realised that the nurse was gone and the door was shut. Miho was standing with her back against it and her mask pushed to one side, watching them as though she wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms around them both as well, but she stayed back and gave them space. Tenzou was grateful. He hoped she’d got here before Kakashi had gone to fetch him, so that Kawaguchi hadn’t been left without a friend at his side for even a minute since he’d woken up.

Kawaguchi’s sobs finally subsided, though he was still breathing in wet, shallow gasps. Tenzou pressed kisses into his hair and rubbed slow circles over his back. Slowly, Kawaguchi relaxed into him until he was a boneless weight against Tenzou’s chest. Tenzou took it as a good sign.

“None of it was real,” Kawaguchi said. His voice was quiet and scratchy, but he sounded like he was starting to believe it. “It felt real. When I woke up I thought I was dreaming.”

“It’s over now,” Tenzou murmured. “I’m sorry we couldn’t break you out of it sooner. Do you want to talk about it?”

Kawaguchi shook his head.

“I want to go home,” he said. “With you.”

Miho straightened off the door. “I’ll sort it out with your doctor,” she said. “You don’t have to wait. Get him out of here, Tenzou.” She pulled her mask back over her face, adjusted it, and then left the room, shutting the door behind her.

Tenzou didn’t need telling twice. He made a mental note to thank Miho tomorrow – because he was certain she’d be round to check on them in the morning – and then gently nudged Kawaguchi off his lap and onto the bed. Kawaguchi clung reflexively before reluctantly disentangling himself from Tenzou’s arms. Tenzou cupped his cheeks, brushing away the last of the tears.

“Do you want to go to your home or mine?” he asked.

“Yours.”

“OK. Let’s grab your stuff and get out of here.”

Kawaguchi’s sister had brought over a bag of supplies in case Kawaguchi woke up and needed to stay for a while in hospital. Tenzou opened it and found some neatly folded clothes: a t-shirt and jogging bottoms, clean underwear. Kawaguchi wriggled into them without getting up off the bed. Despite the fact that he’d slept for three days, he looked very tired. His muscles were probably stiff from lying motionless for so long.

“Can you walk back?” Tenzou asked. He’d carry Kawaguchi if he needed to, but the movement might do him good.

“I think so.” Kawaguchi stood up and then immediately leaned against Tenzou, who wrapped an arm around his waist. “I’m still scared that this is the dream,” he said in a small voice. “And any minute I’ll wake up and you’ll be gone forever. I can’t lose you, Tenzou. I _can’t_. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. You were gone and I was empty and nothing was ever going to make it better.”

Tenzou’s heart clenched. He rested a hand on the back of Kawaguchi’s head, stroking his hair and waiting until Kawaguchi met his gaze. Kawaguchi’s face was pale and his eyes were puffy and he was the most precious, beautiful thing in Tenzou’s life. Never had Tenzou imagined that anyone would love him this much. He hadn’t known he _could_ be loved this much.

“Do you trust me?” he asked. Kawaguchi nodded. “Then you know I’d never lie to you, not even in a dream. This is real. I’m alive. And you can stay at my place for as long as you need, so every morning when you wake up, I’ll be there beside you. I won’t leave you alone.”

Kawaguchi pressed his hand over Tenzou’s heart again, as if double checking, and it was just too much. Tenzou kissed him. He meant to kiss Kawaguchi until his hand fell away from Tenzou’s chest, but it never did. Even when Tenzou pulled him so close that it was crushed between them, even when he whispered over and over against Kawaguchi’s lips that he would never leave, Kawaguchi’s hand stayed firm over Tenzou’s heart as though its steady beat was the only thing that mattered in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's going to be a follow-up to this one because I don't think I've quite wrung all the angst out of this idea yet


	23. Bad dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the genjutsu, Kawaguchi has nightmares

The moon was full outside the bedroom window, and the night was not so dark that Kawaguchi couldn’t see. He lay in Tenzou’s bed, wondering what had woken him. The moonlight came through a chink between the curtains, deepening the edges of things, but the shadows were all familiar. Yet something in the room wasn’t right. He was sure of it. The longer he lay there, holding his breath and trying to put his finger on it, the more wrong he felt. Beside him, Tenzou slept, facing away from him, and only when Kawaguchi turned to look at his still back was he suddenly filled with the certain knowledge that Tenzou was in danger.

“Tenzou,” he whispered, reaching out to touch his shoulder. Tenzou didn’t stir. Kawaguchi’s dread rose to sickening levels. Tenzou was a light sleeper; never in Kawaguchi’s memory had he slept through even the gentlest touch.

Kawaguchi pushed himself up on one arm, leaning over to shake Tenzou, but there was still no response. Not even a twitch. And his arm felt wrong: cold against his fingers. Now he realised it, the whole room was frigid enough that Kawaguchi’s breath came in white clouds, barely visible in the silvery light.

“Tenzou, wake up! Tenzou!”

He wasn’t whispering anymore, and when Tenzou still didn’t wake, Kawaguchi tugged at his arm, rolling him over onto his back. When he saw Tenzou’s face it took him a moment to understand, and then he recoiled, clapping a hand to his mouth to muffle a scream. Tenzou’s eyes were open, his lips slightly parted, and there was no breath clouding from between them. His skin was paler than moonlight, cold enough to chill the whole room, and he didn’t wake even when Kawaguchi clutched at him and pleaded with him to not be dead.

Kawaguchi’s eyes snapped open and the first thing he saw was Tenzou’s face gazing down at him in concern.

“It’s OK,” Tenzou said. “You’re OK. You were dreaming.”

They were still in Tenzou’s bedroom, but it was lit by the warm glow of the lamp on Tenzou’s side of the bed. Otherwise, everything was eerily the same, as though Kawaguchi had woken from a parallel world of this same moment. He could still feel the phantom touch of Tenzou’s cold dead flesh, and he reached up to Tenzou, needing to replace it with warmth and life.

“Fuck.” He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, pressing his palms to Tenzou’s chest and orienting himself. No matter how many times he tried to separate the dreams from reality, it never seemed to stick. His subconscious refused to learn the lesson he kept teaching it. “I’m sorry.”

Tenzou took one of his hands and lifted it gently to brush a kiss against his knuckles.

“You don’t have to apologise,” he said, not for the first time. His patience was endless. 

“But I’ve woken you up every night. For two weeks! It isn’t fair on you.”

“It isn’t fair to you either,” Tenzou said. “If you have to go through this then the least I can do is be here for you when you wake up.”

His sincerity didn’t make Kawaguchi feel any better. If anything, it made him feel guiltier. He sat up and took a deep breath, trying to slow his heartrate. Tenzou adjusted the pillows against the headboard, sitting back against them and then tugging Kawaguchi gently over to nestle against his side. Kawaguchi slid down the bed a little so he could rest his head on Tenzou’s shoulder, and Tenzou’s strong arm held him close. It did help, having Tenzou here when he woke. His body was solid and comforting, and when Kawaguchi was pressed up against him, it was easier to shake off the images of his lifeless body.

“You want to talk about it?” Tenzou murmured.

“Doesn’t it freak you out when I talk about you dying?”

“Not really.” Tenzou’s hand stroked up and down his arm, slow and comforting. “I’m a shinobi. I’ve thought about my own mortality a lot and I think I’ve accepted it as much as I can.”

“I thought I’d accepted it too,” Kawaguchi said. “The idea that all my friends could die at any point. But then I watched you die, and it was…so fast. One moment you were alive and then you were dead, and it suddenly struck me how irreversible that was. I know how stupid that sounds, but it was like I’d never really known that death was permanent until your heart stopped beating and I couldn’t make it start again. That you could vanish from my life in a few seconds with just one mistake that I made…”

“That you made?” Tenzou asked.

They hadn’t talked about the genjutsu much. Kawaguchi hadn’t talked about it much with anyone since he’d first woken and tried to make sense of how he’d ended up in a hospital bed. He couldn’t remember now exactly what he’d told Kakashi, and then Miho when she’d arrived shortly after, but it had been a jumble of details centred on the failed mission and Tenzou’s death. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it since then, as though speaking it aloud might make it come true.

“What happened?” Tenzou asked softly when Kawaguchi didn’t answer. “How did I die?”

Remembering it brought back all the shame and shock and terror.

“It was my fault,” Kawaguchi blurted out. “It was all my fault. He was attacking _me_ and I wasn’t strong enough so you had to come save me. That blow was meant for me. It was supposed to kill me. And you stepped right into the way and it hit you instead.”

The hand stopped stroking his arm. Instead Tenzou squeezed him tighter against his side and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. This relationship was still so new; at first Kawaguchi had treasured every kiss because he’d yearned for them for so long, and now he treasured them because he didn’t know how many more he’d get before death ripped them apart. He wanted to press each memory between the pages of his mind in case one day they were all he had left.

“Kawaguchi, if I died saving your life then I would consider it a good death,” Tenzou said.

Kawaguchi stiffened. “You’re not allowed to die for me,” he said. “I don’t want that.”

“If it came down to it and the only way I could protect you…”

Kawaguchi sat bolt upright, all the progress he’d made slowing his pulse undone.

“I said I don’t want that! Do you know how awful it was to be left behind? The way Miho _looked_ at me afterwards, like she wished I was the one who’d died.”

“She would never –” Tenzou started, but Kawaguchi cut him off.

“And when we got home to the village, _everyone_ looked at me like that, and I wished I’d died instead. I wished it so hard, and I was _angry_ with you for making me feel that way, and then I hated myself for being angry. I wanted to die, Tenzou, so you may as well have just let me instead of leaving me all alone.”

Tenzou pulled him into his arms again, not gently this time, squeezing Kawaguchi to his chest tightly enough that it almost hurt. Kawaguchi tried to wriggle free, full of that misplaced anger all over again, but Tenzou wouldn’t let him go. 

“Never ask me to stand aside and let you get hurt,” Tenzou said fiercely. “I will protect you until the day I die, whether that comes sooner or later. And that is _my_ choice, Kawaguchi. It’s not your fault, it’s _mine_ , because I get to decide who is worth sacrificing myself for. My whole life has been spent being told what to do, which causes to care about, but duty and honour are the price I pay to live here. They’re obligatory. Everything I’ve protected and fought for in missions was someone else’s precious thing, not mine. I never had anything. No family, no home, no traditions, no anything at all except what the village forced on me – and I’m not ungrateful, but none of it was my choice.”

Kawaguchi had stopped trying to pull away. He so rarely heard Tenzou mention his past that even now it felt intimate to be allowed even this brief glimpse.

“You are the one thing I protect because I _want_ to,” Tenzou said. “Not because I have to. It’s not my job to die for you, but you are _my_ most precious thing and I would do anything to keep you safe. Your heart is the only thing that’s ever truly been mine, and the only thing I’ve ever truly wanted. So I can’t tell you that your nightmares will never come true, but if I ever die for you it won’t be your fault. It’ll be the one choice I’ve ever been free to make. I hope I never have to put you through that, and I’ll do everything in my power to keep us both safe, but if I die before you, Kawaguchi, then remember that you were worth saving.”

Tenzou had never said ‘I love you’ in only three words. That didn’t mean he’d never said it.

Kawaguchi’s throat felt tight, so instead of trying to muster a reply, he buried his face in Tenzou’s neck and let himself be held. Tenzou’s arms were still wrapped around him with a fierce strength that squeezed all the anger and self-hatred out of him. It may well come back tomorrow, but he had no doubt that Tenzou would banish it again and again until he could sleep through the night.

“I’m sorry if that wasn’t what you needed to hear,” Tenzou mumbled against his hair.

Kawaguchi let out a surprised laugh. “Tenzou, only you could tell me I’m the only thing worth dying for and then worry that you said the wrong thing.”

“So it wasn’t the wrong thing?”

“No.” Kawaguchi nuzzled his nose against Tenzou’s neck. “The thought of you dying still terrifies me, but I’ll never make peace with it if I pretend it’s never going to happen. I don’t need you to lie to me and pretend we live in a perfect world where everyone lives to be ninety. I’ve got to get over this, and being in denial isn’t going to help me do that.”

Tenzou’s arms loosened just a little as he relaxed.

“What is going to help you?”

“I don’t know,” Kawaguchi said honestly. “Having you here when I wake up. Talking to you about it. Living each day until the memories aren’t so sharp and the dreams stop haunting me.”

“We can do that,” Tenzou said. “You can stay here for as long as you need to.”

“Even if you don’t have a full night’s sleep for another two weeks?”

“Your happiness is worth losing a little sleep over.”

Tenzou’s hand moved up to tangle in his hair, and Kawaguchi closed his eyes, safe and warm in the presence of the person he loved most, at least for one more night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made myself cry a little with this one. First time I've got myself with the angst
> 
> Also, if you need more Tenguchi (with a side of kakairu), Badger wrote a little fic about the four of them watching a horror film <3 Some fluff to heal you after the angst. [Read it here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27563434)


	24. Long distance comfort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part 3 of the genjutsu saga. Tenzou and Miho go off on Team Phoenix's next mission, leaving Kawaguchi behind alone

It was the first time Kawaguchi had ever been alone in Tenzou’s house. He stood in the entrance way, stomach still tight and heart still beating too hard. He’d seen off Tenzou and Miho at the village gate, their first mission since he’d been captured in the genjutsu.

He didn’t know if it would have been worse to go with them, but he hadn’t been given a choice. When Miho had brought the mission scroll back from her meeting with the hokage, Kawaguchi’s throat had gone dry at the sight of it in her hands. She’d taken him aside into an empty meeting room and told him firmly that he wasn’t coming with them, and he’d only been relieved for a breath until he’d remembered that Tenzou would still be going. Then he’d felt so sick he’d had to sit down, and Miho had told him, not unkindly, that this was exactly why she didn’t want him to come.

“You’re not ready yet,” she’d said. “It’s only been three weeks.”

“But Tenzou’s going,” Kawaguchi had protested. He’d looked towards the door as though he’d expected Tenzou to come bursting in and proclaim that he was staying home too. “You can’t go without me! What if something happens? What if he needs me? Are you taking someone to replace me?”

“No, but I’ll be there,” Miho said. “And Kakashi is lending us his ninken in case we need help. I’ll look after him, I promise.” She laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed hard, as though trying to wring the tension out of him. It was grounding, but not enough. “It should be a short mission. And it’s an easy one: an assassination, pretty straightforward. We’ll be gone for maybe five days.”

“Five days,” Kawaguchi repeated. It seemed an interminably long time for Tenzou to be out of his sight, beyond the safety of the village walls. The world outside the village had teeth.

“If we can make it back quicker, we will,” Miho said. “But in the meantime, I want you to see the psych nin at least once while we’re gone and try not to worry too much. OK?”

Kawaguchi’s fingernails were leaving indents in his palms.

“OK,” he said, and it felt like he was sending Tenzou to his death.

That morning, Tenzou had slipped the front door keys to his apartment into Kawaguchi’s hand as they were leaving the house.

“You can stay at my place if you want,” he said. “Or just come round every now and then if you think it’ll help.”

Kawaguchi had looked down at the key in his hand and then thrown himself into Tenzou’s arms and clung to him for so long that Tenzou was running late. But Tenzou didn’t make him let go. He only kissed Kawaguchi’s cheek and held him solidly, like his arms might never unwind. But eventually they did. And then he was gone, and Kawaguchi was all alone.

He stepped further into the flat where he’d lived for the past three weeks. Tenzou’s apartment had come to feel like home, yet suddenly it was quieter than Kawaguchi had ever known it. It was a different quiet than the comfortable silence that sometimes fell between them, or the rare occasions when Tenzou fell asleep while Kawaguchi was still awake. This silence was bereft. Kawaguchi hated it.

But for the next five days, he’d have to learn to live with it.

  


* * *

  


The first letter came the following morning. Kawaguchi was woken by the strangest sound: a scratching and banging from the front door. When he opened it, he found Pakkun sitting outside, a piece of paper rolled up and tucked securely into a scroll case around his collar.

“I didn’t sign up to be a messenger,” he grumbled. “You better appreciate this.”

“Are they all right?” Kawaguchi asked, fumbling the paper in his rush to unroll it. He’d been awake half the night, afraid to sleep and waking from nightmares when he did. “Did something happen?”

“Your boyfriend missed you,” Pakkun said, giving him an unimpressed stare. He then turned and scampered off before Kawaguchi could grill him further.

Kawaguchi closed the door and then leant back against it and raised the letter. It was short, and just the sight of Tenzou’s neat handwriting was enough to make Kawaguchi feel a little better.

_It’s 20:11 and I’m still alive,_ the letter said. _We haven’t reached our destination yet, but we’re making camp for the night. We should arrive tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll write to you again then._

It was completely unromantic, the bare minimum of information, and yet Kawaguchi pressed the paper to his heart and closed his eyes. It had told him everything he needed to know. Tenzou was safe, Tenzou was thinking of him, Tenzou was still alive.

  


* * *

  


The second letter arrived on the evening of the following day. Kawaguchi had just got home from a patrol shift and changed straight into Tenzou’s clothes. Tenzou had left some food in the fridge for him: homemade curry that he’d portioned carefully into three individual containers with a single serving of rice for each, to make sure that Kawaguchi ate properly for at least the first few days of his absence.

A knock came at the door while he was heating up his dinner. It wasn’t a dog waiting outside for him today, but Kakashi himself, also wearing casual clothes. He proffered a tight scroll of paper.

“Bisuke left this with me while you were working,” he said. “I haven’t read it, I promise, so if Tenzou’s writing you dirty messages your secret’s safe with me.”

Kawaguchi snorted and stepped aside to let him in, unravelling the paper hastily.

_It’s 13:36 and I’m still alive. We just arrived at the town and should be here until tomorrow, then we’ll be making a hasty escape. Don’t have too many bad dreams tonight, OK?_

Kawaguchi stroked a finger over the letters, then read the first sentence again. Two, three more times, just to ingrain it into his brain. _I’m still alive_.

“Something smells good,” Kakashi commented from the next room. He’d kicked off his shoes and wandered through into the kitchen while Kawaguchi had been distracted. “Good thing I already ate. You don’t mind if I keep you company for a while?”

“I don’t think I’m very good company right now.” Kawaguchi slid the letter into his pocket and followed Kakashi through to the kitchen.

“No, you look like shit,” Kakashi agreed. “Have you slept at all? Your dark circles have dark circles.”

Kawaguchi rubbed a little self-consciously at his eyes. They ached from tiredness.

“Maybe I should stay over tonight,” Kakashi said lightly. “It can’t help, being here all alone. I happen to know that Tenzou’s couch is surprisingly comfy.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I was instructed very fiercely by both of your teammates that I was to look after you while they were away, so if you let me stay, you’ll be helping me into their good graces.”

The microwave dinged, and Kawaguchi stared at it, trying to summon the energy to take the food out and eat. It seemed like an arduous task.

“It’s OK to not be OK,” Kakashi said quietly. “God knows, if you had to be completely stable to work for ANBU then they wouldn’t have many members left. So it’s fine to ask for help every once in a while.”

He sounded so sincere that Kawaguchi couldn’t look him in the eye, in case he saw pity there. Instead he ran a hand through his hair and wet his lips with his tongue.

“Will you stay over?” he asked haltingly.

Kakashi took the plate of food out of the microwave and rummaged in the drawer for cutlery. “Of course I will.”

  


* * *

  


When Kawaguchi woke later that night in a cold sweat, heart pounding, he reached over to Tenzou’s side of the bed in a half-asleep stupor and let out a small panicked sound when he found the sheets empty and cold. Then he remembered that Tenzou was on a mission and fumbled with the lamp. Out in the apartment he heard movement as Kakashi got up, but he was too intent on his task to feel embarrassed that he’d woken him.

He pulled the two letters out of the drawer in the bedside table and smoothed them across his lap. He read them both through, and then glanced at the clock.

“It’s 2:21,” he whispered, “and Tenzou is alive.”

The bedroom door opened and the hallway light spilt in. Kakashi came into the room, unmasked and wearing pyjamas, and carrying two cups of tea. He had a book wedged under one arm.

“I thought you might need something to help you relax,” he said, placing one of the cups down on Kawaguchi’s nightstand. “You don’t mind if I sit in here for a bit?”

“You didn’t have to,” Kawaguchi said, embarrassed and guilty in equal measure.

Kakashi slid into the other side of the bed, undeterred. “What did you think I was staying over for? It defeats the purpose if I roll over and ignore you when you have a nightmare.”

“Was this in your instructions from Tenzou too?”

“Nope. I just like you a lot and want to be there for my friend.”

This time Kakashi was the one who looked away, made sheepish by his own honesty, and he tensed a little in surprise when Kawaguchi leaned against him, though he recovered quickly and wrapped an arm around him, only a little awkward. Kawaguchi appreciated it. Kakashi was as reticent with hugs as Tenzou had been when Kawaguchi had first got to know him, but while Tenzou had softened towards physical contact after a little persistence on Kawaguchi’s part, Kakashi still kept his distance most of the time. Kawaguchi still had hopes for him, but for now he was grateful for every scrap of affection he was offered.

“Tenzou’s OK, isn’t he?” he asked. He knew it was childish, and that there was no way for Kakashi to know, but he just needed to hear someone else say it. To repeat the assurances of Tenzou’s letters.

“Wait until tomorrow and he’ll tell you himself,” Kakashi said. “But Tenzou’s strong. One of the strongest shinobi we have. And from what I heard this was a pretty low-risk mission as ANBU missions go. I have faith that he’ll be fine.”

Tenzou’s letters were still resting on Kawaguchi’s lap, and he touched one, the paper smooth and cool in the night air.

“Drink your tea,” Kakashi said. “And then lie down and I’ll read you a story.”

Kawaguchi glanced past him at the book on the nightstand.

“Is it porn?”

“What do you take me for, a classless pervert? It’s _erotica_. Trust me, you’ll have great dreams after this.”

A small smile ghosted Kawaguchi’s lips. His heartrate was coming down and he was starting to feel sleepy again. He reached for his tea and took a sip; it was Tenzou’s favourite green tea with lemon, comforting in its familiarity.

Kakashi cracked open the book, entirely serious about reading to him, and for the first time in what felt like days, Kawaguchi laughed.

  


* * *

  


Tenzou pushed open the front door to his apartment and stepped inside. It was lunchtime, and the flat was warm and quiet. At first he thought no one was here, but then he spotted two pairs of shoes in the entryway that weren’t his own. 

He made his way quietly through to the lounge and then smiled at the sight that greeted him. Kawaguchi was curled up on the sofa, sleeping, and Kakashi was sitting on the floor, head resting back against Kawaguchi’s thigh and mask pulled down below his chin. His eyes were closed, but he half raised a hand to Tenzou.

“Welcome back,” he mumbled.

“Am I interrupting naptime?”

Kakashi hummed and cracked his right eye open. “Yeah, which is pretty rude of you. Mission go OK?”

Tenzou stepped over his long legs and crouched down by Kawaguchi, who hadn’t stirred. His hands were curled loosely by his chest, and beneath them on the couch was a messy pile of familiar letters. “It was fine. Has Kawaguchi been OK?”

Kakashi lifted his head and rubbed his neck. “More or less.” He stretched, a joint popping, and then stood. “I might head home and carry on naptime there. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

He pulled up his mask as he left, and then the front door closed quietly behind him and the flat was silent again. Kawaguchi still hadn’t woken. For once, he looked peaceful in his sleep, and Tenzou almost didn’t have the heart to wake him. He rested a hand over Kawaguchi’s and felt his fingers twitch, then pressed a gentle kiss to Kawaguchi’s temple. Kawaguchi sighed softly and his eyelashes fluttered.

“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty,” Tenzou murmured.

Kawaguchi’s sleepy gaze focused on him, and then he reached out, wrapping his arms around Tenzou’s shoulders and burying his face in Tenzou’s neck. He mumbled something that could have been Tenzou’s name, and Tenzou smiled and kissed his hair again, holding him close.

“It’s 12:45,” he said softly, “and I’m home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't decide if I want to do one more in the genjutsu saga. I'd thought of maybe giving Team Phoenix another encounter with the asshole who cast the genjutsu...for revenge purposes, of course. But this one ended on such a fluffy note that now I'm unsure. Thoughts?
> 
> If anyone wants to read a short, sweet and sexy Tenzou/Kawaguchi fic involving a mostly naked fresh from the shower Tenzou and Kawaguchi's appreciation of this, I highly recommend you go read Badger's fic [climb that man like a tree](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27801220). It is every bit as good as the title promises.


	25. Candy overload

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kawaguchi brings Tenzou a present as a thank you for looking after him

The sun was setting by the time Tenzou arrived home from work. It had been an unusually exhausting day full of training and Tenzou’s muscles ached. Kawaguchi had naturally managed to arrange his shifts so his day off aligned with the most punishing day of training, and Tenzou pushed open the door and called out a greeting. Only when no reply came back did he remember that Kawaguchi wasn’t here. After almost a month of Kawaguchi staying over, Tenzou had got so used to it that he’d almost forgotten Kawaguchi had his own home to go back to – which he’d finally done only yesterday.

The flat felt bigger without him. Tenzou kicked off his shoes and made his way through to the lounge. While he’d been staying here, Kawaguchi had taken to piling blankets on one of the sofas and curling up in a warm nest to read or nap while Tenzou wasn’t here, and the blankets were still folded neatly on the cushion. They looked sterile and sad without Kawaguchi there to warm them and welcome Tenzou into their fold when he arrived home.

Tenzou had never thought he’d get used to being greeted with a smile and a hug whenever he got home. He’d certainly never thought he’d miss it when it was gone, yet the silence was oppressive.

He tried to carry on with his usual routine – tried to remember what that had been without Kawaguchi here – and showered and changed into casual, comfy clothes. He was about to head through into the kitchen to make something quick for dinner when he heard an unfamiliar sound from the front door. Turning sharply and hurrying into the hallway, he was in time to see the door open and Kawaguchi step inside, key in hand.

“Hey,” Kawaguchi chirped. “It’s OK if I still let myself in, right? It felt weird to knock.”

Tenzou relaxed. Just like that, he suddenly felt more at home.

“I told you to keep the key for a reason,” he said. “Come over whenever you want.”

Kawaguchi was carrying a plastic tub, which he placed carefully on the floor beside his shoes while he came and wrapped his arms around Tenzou, humming contentedly. Tenzou kissed him, and his day finally felt complete.

“What did you bring over?” he asked, nodding towards the tub.

Kawaguchi brushed some hair out of his eyes and glanced back at the tub, looking a little sheepish.

“It’s a present,” he said. “For you. I wanted to say thank you for letting me stay here for so long – and I guess it’s also a sorry for waking you up in the night so many times. I know, I know,” he said before Tenzou could interject, “you don’t want any apologies, but, well, you’ve taken such good care of me and I really appreciate it so I wanted to do something for you too. It’s only something small but…I tried really hard so I hope it’s OK.”

By now Tenzou was very curious about what could be in the tub, but no matter what it was, he was touched by the thought that had gone into it.

“Before you give it to me,” he said, “you are doing all right home alone, aren’t you? You didn’t have nightmares last night?”

“I had one,” Kawaguchi said, “but it wasn’t that bad. Really,” he added when Tenzou looked disbelieving. “It was sad but it wasn’t scary. I didn’t wake up and freak out, I promise. I got back to sleep pretty quickly and then slept through until my alarm went off.”

Tenzou looked at him more closely. The dark circles under his eyes were fading and he looked brighter and more alert than he’d done in those first couple of weeks when the nightmares had been at their worst. Since then he’d steadily got better, but Tenzou had feared a relapse once Kawaguchi was sleeping alone again some of the time.

“You don’t look like you’re about to pass out on me so I guess I’ll believe you this time,” he said, and Kawaguchi kissed him again. “So what did you bring me?”

Kawaguchi fetched the tub, and now he looked nervous. “When you see these, you’re going to make an assumption, and I’m telling you now that you are _wrong_ ,” Kawaguchi said, which only whetted Tenzou’s curiosity even more. “I spent all day making them and they’re _good_ , I swear.”

“ _What_ are?”

Kawaguchi shot him one last look of trepidation and then pried off the lid. The smell of chocolate wafted immediately into the air, and then Tenzou saw the pile of brownies sitting inside.

“Did you bake those?” he asked cautiously, and Kawaguchi smacked him on the arm.

“Don’t sound so scared! I did make them and I tried one so I know they’re OK! I made four whole batches – well, I didn’t get around to really making the first batch because I tried to melt the chocolate in the microwave and it burnt, and then I cooked the second batch and that burnt too. And then I turned the temperature down too low and the third try came out really gooey and I tried to put them back in the oven but it didn’t really work out. But these ones!” He held them out, defiant and with a touch of pride. “I followed the recipe _exactly_ and I learnt from all my mistakes and they came out really well. They’re the best things I’ve ever cooked!”

He looked so earnest and so adorable that Tenzou actually picked up one of the brownies. It was a little sticky, but it didn’t look burnt or dry, and it smelt good.

“You promise you’re not trying to kill me off for real?” he said.

“Tenzou!”

Now he was getting the kicked puppy face, and Tenzou could no more say no to that look than he could fly.

“All right, I’ll try it,” he said, and took a tentative bite.

It wasn’t the best brownie he’d ever had but, shockingly, it wasn’t the worst. A little stodgy, a little too sweet, but perfectly edible. Tasty, even. It probably was the best thing Kawaguchi had ever made by a long shot – the bar was very low.

“That’s actually good,” Tenzou said with more amazement than was probably polite, but Kawaguchi beamed at him.

“I told you so! I spent all day baking and I tried _really_ hard!”

Tenzou took a second bite without prompting, and Kawaguchi looked delighted.

“I’ll put the rest in the kitchen,” he said, fitting the lid back on the box. “I know they’re not amazing or anything but I wanted to give you something I’d made myself. It felt a bit more special that way even if they’re not as good as the ones I could have bought at the bakery.” He looked sheepish again. “Though maybe that would have been a better present.”

“No, they’re perfect,” Tenzou said. He caught Kawaguchi around the waist with one arm and pulled him close. “Thank you. It was really sweet of you. No bad joke intended.”

“You should always intend your bad jokes around me,” Kawaguchi said. “I appreciate them. And I appreciate you too. You’ve been such an amazing boyfriend, Tenzou. The best one I’ve ever had.”

“And that’s saying a lot.”

“Hey, don’t ruin the moment by calling me a slut.”

“You said it, not me.”

Kawaguchi laughed, and it was so refreshing to see him happy again. Tenzou wasn’t naïve enough to think the trauma had entirely gone away, but if Kawaguchi could laugh and smile again then that was enough to celebrate.

“Want to stay over tonight?” he asked on a whim.

“You don’t need to worry about me so much,” Kawaguchi said gently. “I really am doing OK.”

“I know. But it’s weird not having you here, and I happen to like it when you stay the night.”

Kawaguchi’s lips curved into a knowing smile. “I’d be offended if you didn’t.” He threaded his fingers into Tenzou’s hair, kissed him slow and deep. “Want to go to bed early?”

“I’d like that,” Tenzou murmured. “But only after I’ve finished my brownie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I suppose this concludes the genjutsu saga. It's not the original final one I was planning to write, but I wrote something very different and didn't like it lol. Sometimes that's the way it goes! So have this cute fluff instead <3


End file.
